The ever evolving SAP landscape – Part 1 of 3
The objective of this blog series is to give an overview of how SAP has evolved in the recent years and what were the drivers that compelled them to grow the way they did. The blog series also gives a flavor of various components in SAP landscape today and how they form pieces of a Jigsaw puzzle that needs to be arranged correctly to be of business relevance.
Over the last 10 years, SAP has tried to transform itself from an Application vendor to a Platform Vendor. The earlier generation of SAP product suite was a monolithic layer of functionalities that could meet elementary business needs of any enterprise. The product was rich in transactional processing features and was very mediocre from usability and reporting perspective. At the same time SAP saw the opportunity to expand itself into areas such as Integration that could help it grow significantly by additional license sales.
At the turn of the century the ‘S/w and s/w related service revenue’ amounted to Euro 3.86bn with a total revenue of Euro 5.88bn. But over the next 3-4 years SAP saw a flat/negative growth from additional s/w license sales. With the introduction of Netweaver platform in the early part of the century and introduction of products like XI (a.k.a PI), BW (a.k.a SAP BI) and EP the license sales shot up again in 2004 clocking consistently in the range of 10 to 15% growth. With this SAP had smoothly transitioned from a monolithic ERP vendor to a more flexible and scalable IT platform vendor. The key components that have helped SAP achieve this growth are attributable to the ever reliable ABAP stack of SAP products, the Java stack that enables expansion and ease of use via XI and Enterprise Portal. SAP has positioned the SAP Netweaver stack as a business process platform that enables business driven software architecture to meet ever changing business needs. In simple terms, it means that with SAP Netweaver, companies now have an ability to build applications that can be composed using a layer of Enterprise and Web services. These are called composite applications.
The SAP System Integrator space being as competitive as it is, has SI’s working overtime to get an edge over each other. Each SI has built focused competencies to ensure they have credentials to demonstrate capability in these areas. In the next blog of this series we will see more on composite applications and the composite application architecture.
PS: Forrester has recently published The Forrester Wave™: SAP Implementation Providers, Q3 2009 report. To download and read the complete report, please see the link below
http://www.infosys.com/sap/SAP-implementation-leader/default.asp
