This years SAP Teched tells us to
“CONNECT. COLLABORATE. CO-INNOVATE!”
Inspiring I know. Before you run off to convince your boss that you should go to Vegas for a week long jolly. Enjoy
“ENTERPRISE SOA – PUT THE POWER TO WORK!”
As expected the main buzz at Tech-ed was again around enterprise services and composite applications. Aside from the usual SAP showcase road show there was a lot of side talk and presentations around Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. A couple of the key concepts that I walked away with were Collective Intelligence applications and Enterprise Widgets.
Contrary to popular belief Web2.0 is more than rounded corners, stripes and beta stars. Web 2.0 is about content and collaboration. A collective intelligence application gets smarter as people uses it. Various examples illustrated were of wiki faq’s, blog product reviews and forum style customer self service applications where the customer and the vendor share the same configuration and data, with use the information becomes a lot more applicable concise and reliable, which means win win.
Widgets were really big this year, widgets are light weight mini apps that allow users to monitor or interact with certain information. Widgets can be desktop based, web based or a combination of both. Some examples of widgets I saw were of system monitoring, reporting and simple approvals for things like transports or purchase orders.Various vendors showcased there widget servers which allowed for remote and local SAP integration through community portals such as Yahoo. This was pretty powerful, say your on the road and need to approve some purchase orders in SAP you can do this through Yahoo. SAP themselves showcased some widget development, I wasn’t quite sure of the positioning of widgets given their enterprise portal solution.
Enterprise Services Oriented Architecture
Went to quite a few workshop and presentations on Enterprise Services and not much has really changed, SAP are still saying the same thing, the nice thing is that they are slowly delivering and this shows through some of the customer presentations.
What I was impressed with was SAP’s market awareness; they are at the forefront of a lot of open and industry specific initiatives. The phrase interoperability has now replaced the word proprietary. One initiative that surprised me was the “Imagineering Fellowship”, SAP have a secondment program whereby they get community experts together from Customers and Partners to brainstorm and prototype new initiatives, I met a few participants the results looked pretty cool.
Process Integration
Went to a quite a few workshops on XI, I was specifically interested in what was coming up and what was the hype around End-toEnd (E2E), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and the Consumer Environment (CE).
XI is going through another re-branding from Integration to Enterprise. This re-branding is due to component changes which align nicely with the ESA strategy, the enterprise repository supersedes the integration repository and provides better global data, service definitions and mappings, this will makes it a lot easier to use and understand. I did a couple of workshops test driving the new product (7.1), some of the concepts like xml validation, pre-defined content and vendor adaptors (interoperability) are a long time coming. The service registry takes the UDDI webservice directory concept into the future by putting governance and process around reuse. On the whole I felt the new applications are leaps and bounds ahead of the initial offering but some concepts are still in beta mode. The service modeling tools are very cool but felt like taking the scenic route.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) for SAP is still very much a concept when compared with webMethods offering. SAP aims to extend traditional workflow, BPM and BPEL by providing event driven process milestone monitoring using webservices. A lot of key words but the idea behind a BAM framework is to provide an easy, consistent way to centrally monitor heterogeneous business applications. For BPM and BAM to be successful I feel that SAP needs to focus on user federation (principal propagation as SAP coined it) and that the workflow engine needs to be decoupled from the brokered middleware. Maybe this is project Galaxy
I went to a workshop on End-To-End solution operations for XI, this seems to be a packaged service / strategy offered by SAP to do root cause analysis, diagnostics, change management and business process integration. It is quite disjointed to be called End to End however some good tools and concepts.
The Consumer Environment (CE) was something I heard about before I went to tech-ed, I attended a couple of presentations and all i can think of is it is targeted at non XI customers and ISV’s. As it suggests the CE is environment for consuming enterprise services, it appeared to me to be a cut down Netweaver framework with the latest WebAS built on Java EE 5. I can only imagine that they will be adding more later if this is targeted at software partners with a view to enabling and innovating.
Master Data Management
I think everybody is in violent agreement that master data management is the backbone to an Service Oriented Architecture, given this why hasn’t SAP MDM taken off?
I sniffed around a few workshops and demos on MDM to see what has changed in the 12 months since I last looked. The presentations are still the same, heavy on positioning and light on real world examples of delivery. The only thing I could see that has changed in the last year is they have delivered more admin and configurations functions through the portal.
The focus is still very much on modeling processes. The modeling tools delivered by SAP still have that 80/20 feel, as soon as you get into the reality of integration and transaction integrity you realize the modeling is only good for prototyping or very simple processes. As a product suite it feels more like disjointed software and concepts, heavily reliant on XI and Portal for integration.
Duet
Got time with the SAP Duet Product Manager, last time I saw Duet I left with more questions than answers and felt that it far too many limitations, specifically infrastructure requirements, available functionality and the ability to extend.
SAP has added a few new scenarios like E-recruitment and various CRM processes. I was really impressed how Outlook is used as a framework seamlessly deliver functionality of other MS products – for example the Infopath forms combined with task bar and help functions makes the screens very easy to navigate and understand. The product is still focused on occasional users and managers. The scope of functionality is very specific and configuration limited to aesthetics . I was told that in the near future there is plans for an SDK but didn’t get a feel how easy it would be to extend or add own functionality.
Figures quoted to me were around 700 global projects and less than a hand full of sites live. Despite SAP saying that Duet is meant to compliment their Netweaver offerings (Portal), the product feels like a show case for Microsoft Office. Given the limitations in infrastructure, licensing, scenarios and configuration, it begs the question why wouldn’t you develop a solution yourself independent of both SAP and MS.
Conclusion
SAP the company seems a lot wiser and more market conscious. I think that this can be put down to the community networking sites and the industry initiatives that they have been involved in. The last tech-ed I went to there was a real SAP v Oracle v Microsoft v IBM feel, a lot of chest beating, back slapping and hype. This time round there was far less hype and misdirection. Instead of trying to one up their competitors, they are now working closer with them and looking to their customers for inspiration and feedback.
On the whole there was nothing really new at Tech-ed, this is a relief because it showed that the technical directions taken in the past have proven to be the right ones. Apart from a few surprise mergers and acquisitions I think the technology is pretty much set and will continue to mature over the next few years. What I would expect is for SAP to look externally for innovation and start pushing harder Netweaver as an open development platform.
