SAP chief developer heads for the 'clouds'
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SAP's chief software architect talked about one of the company's first on-demand offerings, its software-as-a-service philosophy, search functionalities in enterprise software, Web service standards and more in an interview.
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The 2008 Microsoft Office System Developer Conference this week focuses on the company's Office application suite as an application development platform in and of itself.The event in San Jose, Calif. features a presentation by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and is the first time it has been held away from the company's Redmond, Wash. campus."We are holding the first open-to-the-public Office developer conference," said Chris Bryant, Microsoft senior product manager in the Office platform strategy group. When previously held in 2005 and 2006, the event was invitation-only."We decided it was time to reach out broadly," to the public, said Bryant. The company estimates that approximately 45 percent of developers worldwide do development work related to the Office platform, he said.At the event, Gates will give a keynote presentation featuring a guest from FedEx, David Zanca, senior vice president for e-commerce technologies, who will show how FedEx is extending Office with custom interfaces.?FedEx will launch FedEx QuickShip, an add-in for Microsoft Outlook. With the add-in, users can create a FedEx shipping order from within Outlook. The shipping form is pre-populated with contact information.Microsoft will make several announcements at the show. The company will launch version 2 of its OBA (Office Business Applications) Sample Kit for SAP, which lets developers build an Office business application that uses SAP as a back-end data source. Version 2 features compatibility with the newly released Visual Studio 2008 development toolset. Also, the company will offer OBA Sample Kit for PeopleSoft to connect to PeopleSoft data sources. Both the PeopleSoft and SAP kits are free.Another product, Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 1.1, a free download from MSDN that adds SharePoint project types to Visual Studio, Bryant said. Developers can build a Web part or a workflow. New project types are featured, including the ability to build a SharePoint site template from an existing SharePoint site. Developers can build an application on a SharePoint site and redeploy it to other SharePoint instances.The company will release to manufacturing its BizTalk Adapter Pack. "They are data source adapters for Oracle, SAP, and Siebel," for exposing those data sources as Web services and connecting them to SharePoint, said Bryant. The product, to be globally available March 1, presents a more unified data connectivity layer on top of different data sources, he said. This product is expected to cost $5,000 per processor.Another product on tap from Microsoft is OBA Component Library for Financial Services, also a free product. "It's a set of more than 100 standards-based components that allow developers to build Office business applications in the financial sector," said Bryant. New reference and sample applications will be offered in such spaces as insurance packaging and capital market packaging.?Microsoft will debut the Winter 2008 release of the online Office Office Live Small Business, which will be version 2 of the service. With this release, Microsoft will offer a base, free offering and then sell additional services, such as extra storage or mail boxes. A small business would get a Web site and the opportunity to have a domain name and a set of e-mail boxes, Bryant said."Customer feedback has essentially told [Microsoft] that the packaging options [were] not as granular as people want," said Bryant.The company will announce its Metro program for Unified Communications, which will have developer evangelists engaging ISV partners to build unified communications-enabled applications such as ones incorporating speech into applications. Microsoft will seek ISV partners for this program.FedEx also will show proof of concept applications to deepen its connection to Office, including a connection between FedEx Kinkos printing services and Microsoft Word. Users would be able to choose professional printing options and select a local FedEx Kinkos office where they could pick up their order.Also planned by FedEx is a link with SharePoint pertaining to shipping and an integration with Word in which the Office ribbon is customized for access to binding, stapling, and collating.
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(InfoWorld) - Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries. SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), to be available in March, will enable finance, sales, purchasing, and production departments to collect, analyze, and track all sales and operations-planning data in a central location, thus cutting the time office staff spends compiling and preparing information for directors to make decisions, SAP said Wednesday. The application, the newest member in the SAP xApp family of composite applications, will help companies deal with a common challenge in their sales operations: obtaining a consolidated view of all the sales planning-related data that flows through spreadsheets and applications used by numerous departments, according to Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. SAP's composite applications, which run on the company's NetWeaver integration middleware, tap reusable functions, or "services," from existing IT systems, automating processes that improve collaboration among business units and business partners, according to SAP With SAP xSOP, each user sees the same sales and operations planning data at the level of detail they need via role-based dashboards, according to SAP. For instance, a detergent maker's sales and marketing directors can use their dashboards to determine the regional campaigns and in-store promotions needed to achieve a monthly million-unit projection. Production managers can use the same projection to determine how much detergent will be powdered, how much will be liquid, and how many tablets to plan for. Integrated key performance indicators will be available in general categories such as demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget. The indicators can be easily added and altered.
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Craig Lathrop, currently CTO of Kaplan Professional, has been tapped to be CIO of the Americas' SAP Users' Group.
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SAP's upcoming suite of hosted apps, code-named A1S, is the first of its kind designed for medium-sized businesses.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP AG has brought in outside talent Uwe Herold as its chief information officer (CIO), filling a post vacant since the previous incumbent left the company earlier this year. The business applications vendor confirmed Thursday that Herold joins SAP Oct. 1. He will also hold a position on the company's board of directors in the area of human resources, processes and production and report to Claus Heinrich, one of SAP's executive board members. SAP operates a two-tier board system with a board of directors and an executive board. Herold will be based at SAP's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Most recently CIO at German automotive supplier Brose Fahrzeugteile GmbH & Co., Herold has 15 years of experience in business process engineering and IT management. While at Brose, he worked on SAP implementations and so can also bring an SAP user perspective to his new employer. Before joining Brose in 1999, Herold headed up process engineering and organizational development efforts at fluid technology company Hydac Filtertechnik GmbH. "Like any other enterprise that places value on developing and harnessing internal talent, SAP always considers internal applicants for vacant roles," an SAP spokeswoman in Germany wrote in response to an e-mail for comment on why the company chose an outsider as the CIO. "At the same time, it is also important for us to bring in fresh ideas and different expertise from time to time. In this case, Herold was the ideal candidate for this role and we are confident that with his wealth of experience he will be an asset to SAP." Herold replaces Carol Wilson who left the company after three years in the job earlier this year. Wilson joined Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. in April as its implementation director charged with the development and delivery of the Indian outsourcing and consulting firm's IT services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
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Microsoft officials preached the company's Oslo computing vision Tuesday, which encompasses services deployment from the client to the cloud and making models a mainstream part of development.Officials discussed Oslo and related efforts in business process management and SOA at the Microsoft 2007 SOA and Business Process Conference in Redmond, Wash. The intent of the event is to make it easier to build applications that matter to business, according to the company.Oslo features two top-level points, said Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft. "The first is we're doubling down on services," he said. "We've been working in services and [are] a leader on services and we're extending that from the client and making a huge bet on the cloud." Microsoft will host services itself, he said.?The second main point is making a platform that is fundamentally model-driven. Microsoft officials expounded on a new modeling tool and a repository to break down application silos. A modeling language will be featured that interoperates with other modeling languages such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) for Web Services.Microsoft technologies shown included an application composer to map application parts to systems.Also emphasized Tuesday was the company's Internet Service Bus concept for SOA, featuring a hosted platform for building composite applications, connecting disparate systems, and providing communication between end points. Microsoft's Internet Service Bus has encompassed hosted building-block services to connect systems across business units and partners as well as .Net Framework extensions.An attendee lauded Microsoft for finally countering rivals by detailing its SOA efforts."I think that prior to this point, it's been hard using Microsoft SOA technologies in competitive situations with other vendors like IBM and Tibco and now what I see is the kind of vision and platform that we need to have in place in order to implement a full SOA [implementation] on the Microsoft stack," said Sam Gentile, principal consultant with Neudesic, a Microsoft technology platform partner.But an industry analyst was less impressed with Microsoft's Oslo vision."I think it made sense from the aspiration perspective, but I thought there's still a lot of details left to be clarified," said Dwight Davis, analyst with Ovum. One detail Davis wanted was whether the new modeling tool would work with pre-existing tools.Also, some of Microsoft's discussion sounded familiar to the company's Dynamic IT plan, Davis said. (Microsoft has noted in a press statement that Oslo builds on the model-driven and service-enabled principals of Microsoft Dynamic IT.)Microsoft's plan also sounded akin to the company?s Dynamic Systems Initiative for agile businesses, which was not even mentioned today, Davis noted.Microsoft also did not mention its previously discussed SML (Service Modeling Language) technology for modeling complex IT services and systems, Davis said. "Where was SML today?" Davis asked.Oslo will not involve new products but instead incorporates Oslo-based functionality into new products, such as a version of Visual Studio currently referred to as visual Studio "10."
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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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IBM is moving aggressively into the software space.
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The model behind SAP's SOA The close relationship between HP and SAP, which led to the joint announcement of the latter's Enterprise SOA effort, has spawned a new applications development and deployment lifecycle model from HP's Bristol Labs â where much of the development work for SAP was carried out.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Two months after theÂ resignation of Shai Agassi, a driving force behind SAP's product strategy, the German software vendor on Wednesday announced the appointment of its first chief technology officer. Vishal Sikka, formerly senior vice president and chief software architect at SAP, will head the company's newly created Office of the CTO, responsible for ensuring a "clear and harmonized roadmap" for SAP's products, the company said. He will report to CEO Henning Kagermann and be based in the U.S. SAP felt it needed a CTO to oversee some broad changes that are underway at the company, including its renewed focus on the midmarket, the introduction of new on-demand products, and the continued rollout of NetWeaver and its SOA strategy, said SAP spokesman Frank Hartmann. "We thought it was necessary bearing in mind the strong strategic focus of such a role and the responsibilities he is going to bear," Hartmann said. Sikka shouldn't be seen as a replacement for Agassi, whose responsibilities have been divided among several executives who report directly to Kagermann, although part of his job will overlap with Agassi's former duties, Hartmann said. Agassi had been president of SAP's product and technology group and was credited with spearheading its NetWeaver and on-demand strategies. Once tipped as a future SAP CEO, he resigned April 1 after SAP voted to keep Kagermann in that position until 2009. SAP also recentlyÂ lost another senior executive, Aliza Peleg, managing director of SAP Labs in the U.S., who will leave the business applications company by the end of June. It wasn't immediately clear how Sikka's responsibilities as CTO will differ from those of his previous job, where he was responsible for SAP's roadmap and software architecture. Before joining SAP, he was responsible for application development technologies at Peregrine Systems. He holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and is based in SAP's office in Palo Alto, California.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services plans to train over 1,500 staff over the next two years on software and technologies from business software vendor SAP in a move to meet growing demand worldwide for consultants certified on SAP software.
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The Atlantic project will allow users to access SAP's Business Suite through IBM's Lotus Notes.
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German business software vendor SAP plans to relocate a number of administrative jobs from its German headquarters and European subsidiaries to Prague, in a move aimed at streamlining its operations and reducing costs.
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The once-troubled software company is putting in place the ingredients for growth.
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Giving employees, customers and vendors easy-to-use analytics tools that deliver complex reports in real time promises to reshape the business landscape. Learn how SAP deployments running on Dual-core Intel Xeon processor-based blade-server systems provide enterprise-grade business analytics that empower business users and free IT professionals from the chore of running analytics reports.
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(InfoWorld) - You know the argument: SaaS applications are great for green field deployments, but difficult or risky to integrate with those legacy applications where all the really important data lives. With its announcement this week of ApexConnect, an integration tool to connect on-demand applications to back-end systems, analysts say Salesforce.com has moved to stuff that bogeyman back in the closet and has given SaaS enterprise-level capabilities. The company said Monday that ApexConnect integration services will be built on Salesforceâs Apex programming language for multitenant applications announced last month. The new tool will allow the approximately 400 third-party applications on the companyâs AppExchange platform to work with legacy applications, Web services, and other on-demand applications. Apex uses a syntax that most Java programmers will find familiar and allows any component or application created in it to be shared with any other application on the AppExchange. The new tools include ConnectOut, an outbound messaging API that can orchestrate an event in an external system, such as SAP, based on a trigger event in Saleforce.com, said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce. âIt has the ability to kick off a process with an SAP or Oracle system,â Collins said. Another ApexConnect tool, ConnectOracle, will give IT the capability to connect to any Oracle back office system to synchronize data between Salesforceâs CRM application and Oracleâs ERP systems, Collins said. For example, a new account in Salesforce could be automatically added to Oracleâs billing system or enable a business process such as sending out invoices or delivery notices or matching a new order against a previous discount schedule stored in a contract management system. The Apex API will also allow middleware partners including Tibco, Informatica, Web Methods, IBM and Oracle, to connect to any part of Salesforceâs on- demand system. Taken together, Salesforceâs SaaS platform, AppExchange partners, and ApexConnect show SaaS encroaching on enterprise capabilities and reaching a critical mass that will allow IT to build end-to-end system processes, said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. âOne of the main themes that runs through the history of IT is vendors and companies trying to figure out how to support business processes the way they want to run them from the very beginning to the very end,â Pombriant said. âThis is the end game.â The Apex programming language will be available in the first half of 2007 according to Salesforce officials. â[Systems integrators] have been holding back, [on SaaS] waiting to see what the next big technology shift is going to be. Announcements like this that will help them decide,â Pombriant said.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.