The theme of this year’s TechEd revolved around driving industry adoption of enterprise SOA through simplicity and innovation.
In his keynote address, Shai Agassi, president of SAP’s product and technology group, outlined a blueprint that positioned SAP’s mySAP ERP as a modernized core of SOA-enabled business processes upon which customers could innovate upon using the concept of pluggable enhancement packages – collections of pre-built enterprise services.
mySAP ERP 2005 is the go-to release for all customers running R/3, and together with NetWeaver 2004s will serve as a stable core that you can innovate on for the next five years, Agassi told an assembled throng of 5,000 SAP developers and partners.
He said that SAP’s notion of enhancement packages as shared services that plug into this core is key to rolling in new innovative functionality with minimal disruption to core business processes.
Agassi said the optional packages would be released incrementally, probably one or two a quarter, as topical releases themed around functional areas like talent management, procurement enhancements, financial collaboration and so on.
Industry-specific packages are also in the development pipeline.
The first enhancement package is expected to be rolled out in December.
The move is a radical shift from the past whereby users had to continually upgrade to new versions of R/3 and mySAP ERP to grasp the benefits of new functionality and process innovations introduced into the system by SAP.
The enhancement packages offer customers the flexibility to choose and add new functionality at their own pace, Agassi said.
The move also sends a strong signal to SAP’s ecosystem of partners, encouraging them to build their own enhancement packages for SAP-certification.
SAP is offering a roadmap and tools to help coax customers onto mySAP ERP 2005,which they will have to do to benefit from the new SOA innovation. This includes flexible migration paths via instance, function, bottom-up, end-to-end or side-by-side.
SAP’s global services organization and centers of excellence will also be supporting migration by providing foundational master data management, testing and optimization services.
The next major release of mySAP ERP is slated for 2010.
To simplify and accelerate consumption of the enterprise SOA model, SAP is also offering systems developers and architects several new tools.
These include a new Discovery Server System that is intended to give a convenient leg-up on implementation, providing a low risk and low cost starting point to help companies transition to an SOA.
It is a pre-configured enterprise SOA system for constructing and trying out new composite applications in a detached manner, using a sandboxed development environment that does not impact live enterprise systems.
Discovery Server comes shrink-wrapped with NetWeaver (that includes Visual Studio and Developer Studio tools) and also bundles in core mySAP processes, a set of sample functionally-specific business scenarios, enterprise composition services toolbox and an enterprise services repository.
Initially, eight business scenarios will be available, including those for procurement, investment approval, travel expense, production order rescheduling, though SAP said it will continually add more over the next year.
SAP developed Discovery Server in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard Co, to run as an appliance. It is based on HP’s Intel Corp’s Xeon-based Proliant DL 380 server.
Its like getting enterprise SOA in a box, Agassi said.
Additionally, SAP also previewed new leaner deployment capabilities in its Composite Application Framework that simplifies the modeling and orchestration of enterprise services for composite applications. It enhances service composition capabilities of SAP existing Web Dynpro and Visual Composer tools.
We’re providing a much more simplified consumption for Java developers, Agassi said.
SAP also announced a new community hub for modifying, testing and deploying new xApps. The hub comprises of a server that resides next to the mySAP ERP system can be used for sandbox trialing of new functionality before it is rolled out live. The hub gives users a place to find solutions that might fit their needs, modify them and deploy them later on.
It’s like what Apple has done for iTunes. We’re providing iTunes for xApps, Agassi said.
As part of a four-tier blueprint for implementing SOA on SAP, Agassi also outlined a new front-end strategy intended to thrill end-users.
By this he meant implementing multiple user consumption methods based on shared UI services initiatives like Duet, which is an initiative announced in conjunction with Microsoft Corp last year to surface SAP functionality through the Office desktop suite.
Also, SAP Portal, which is an Ajax-enabled version is expected next year, a new Web-based SAP GUI being developed under the codename Project Muse, and a newly developed enterprise search capability built on SAP’s TREX indexing engine and Business Intelligence Accelerator technologies to provide a search-centric interaction model.
A newly announced UI product, SAP Enterprise Search, is initially being released to developers as a free download and is expected to be commercially available sometime in 2007.
We recognize that there is no single best way to access information. It depends on the user-context, Agassi said.
We’re not looking to take the user out of their environments into SAP. Rather we’ll take SAP into the user environment. But we’re doing so in a way that doesn’t force you to rebuild the infrastructure again and again to use these different interfaces.
