SAP: All Roads Lead to SOA
Last week, SAP held their annual Analyst Summit in Las Vegas, and Shai Agassi and a team of SAP executives outlined the company's strategy and product road map in some detail. While I was busy being pitched by myriad public companies alongside my investor brethren at several investment conferences, the industry folks were being showered with SAP's plan to further expand their ecosystem.
Since I was unable to attend the event, I've had to rely on 3rd party accounts of what transpired...
1) IDC posted a comprehensive overview on its blog:
- 1/2 of SAP's R&D spend and 1/3 of the development team are re-architecting mySAP apps into SOA web services for deployment on NetWeaver. According to IDC, SAP plans to have several thousand SOA service components live by EOY2006, with the ultimate goal to get more than 30,000 SOA-driven processes deployed
- Although Shai and his team didn't explicitly commit to an on-demand [or SaaS if you will] product timeline, there were strong hints that SAP is working toward that goal [Shai dubbed it, pursuing alternative delivery models]
2) Blogger Curt Monash has an excellent technical review from the Summit posted at DBMS2.
3) Managing Automation's David Brousell details SAP's plans to launch Mendocino to 40 customers and 10 partner companies on December 23rd.
- As I've written about previously, Mendocino is the latest in a series of cooperative efforts between SAP and Microsoft; likely in the name of combating their common foe [Oracle]
Related Articles:
- eWeek: SAP Pursues On-Demand Model, BPP
- InfoWorld: SAP Charges Forward with SOA Plans
- Red Herring: SAP to Go On-Demand in '06
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