Background

With today's accelerated pace of business change, companies must be able to design, build, implement and execute new business processes quickly, continually and cost-effectively. As business processes require tight collaboration and seamless information exchange across departmental, company and software application boundaries, the IT architecture supporting these processes must serve as an innovation catalyst, not a bottleneck.

Business Benefits

As the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), the SAP NetWeaver® platform enables IT departments to compose and orchestrate enterprise services using model-based development, helping organizations evolve their current IT landscape into a strategic environment that drive business change. With these enterprise services, companies can rapidly enhance their existing business processes or develop and deploy new business processes.

SAP NetWeaver unifies technology components into a single platform, allowing organizations to reduce IT complexity and obtain more business value from their IT investments. It provides the best way to integrate all systems running SAP or non-SAP software.

By delivering preconfigured, industry-oriented business content, SAP NetWeaver also solves companies' challenges of integration and reduces the need for extensive custom implementations, making enterprise applications simpler to implement, quicker to deploy, less expensive to own and more agile for future business growth and innovation.

Among numerous business benefits, SAP NetWeaver:

• Enables flexibility in business strategies and change in the IT infrastructure, including outsourcing, centralization or decentralization, consolidation, and integration of IT following mergers and acquisitions.
• Unifies integration technologies into a single platform, enabling companies to deploy innovative business processes while making use of their existing IT systems.
• Aligns IT practices with business processes, paving a clear path for deploying Enterprise Services Architecture, SAP's business-driven approach to services-oriented architecture.
• Reduces the need for custom integration as the platform is based on industry standards and preintegrated with business applications. SAP NetWeaver can be extended with commonly used development tools such as Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE); Microsoft .NET and IBM WebSphere.

Key Statistics

• Market adoption of SAP NetWeaver continues to grow, with more than than 13,760 customer deployments in production.
• SAP has delivered 1,000 enterprise services for the SAP Business Suite applications through the Enterprise Services Workplace site on SAP Developer Network (SDN).
• More than 2,000 independent software vendors actively building applications on SAP NetWeaver.
• More than 150 active members of the Enterprise Services Community
• Eight industry value networks (IVNs) launched to support banking, chemicals, consumer products, high tech, mill products (forest and paper), oil and gas, public sector, retail and professional services.
• Since the creation of SDN in September 2003, more than 700,000 members worldwide have joined the community, helping drive adoption of SAP NetWeaver.
• More than 90,000 registered Business Process Expert community members
• More than 10,000 consultants are trained to support customers using SAP NetWeaver.

IT Practices

With the SAP NetWeaver platform, organizations can meet business process requirements by implementing crucial IT practices in a flexible, step-by-step approach at low cost. SAP NetWeaver helps organizations perform the following IT practices:

• User productivity enablement. Boost user and group productivity through optimized collaboration and knowledge management and personalized access to critical applications and data.
• Data unification. Consolidate, rationalize, synchronize and manage all master data.
• Business information management. Increase the visibility, reach and usefulness of structured and unstructured enterprise data.
• Business event management. Distribute business events from multiple systems to the appropriate decision makers in the context of the relevant business processes.
• End-to-end process integration. Make disparate applications and systems work together consistently to perform business processes.
• Custom development. Rapidly create new enterprise-scale applications that drive the organization's differential advantage.
• Unified life-cycle management. Automate application management processes and optimize all facets of an application's life cycle.
• Application governance and security management. Maintain an appropriate level of security and quality across intellectual property and information assets.
• Consolidation. Deploy a consolidated technology platform that enables allocation of computing power according to changing business needs.
• Enterprise SOA design and deployment. Consolidate and standardize basic processes and leverage existing IT investments to compose new processes.

Support for Developer Community

To support adoption of SAP NetWeaver, enterprise SOA, and the development of new SAP xApps composite applications, SAP established SDN in September 2003. Since then, more than 700,000 members have joined the community. SDN facilitates the transfer of knowledge and information between developers inside and outside SAP by providing technical articles, Web training, code samples, evaluation tools, special interest groups and developer-specific events, in addition to detailed technical reference materials.

Support for Industry Standards

SAP is already actively driving the adoption of various industry standards and supports industry data exchange standards including Java EE 5, RosettaNet (high tech); the Chem eStandards, UCCNet (consumer products and retail industries); papiNet (paper industry); HL7 (healthcare); and PIDX (oil and gas industries). The company is also helping drive enhanced compatibility of applications and business processes in close cooperation with vertical- and cross-industry standards initiatives such as ACORD (insurance); AIAG (automotive); CWM (business intelligence); GCI (consumer products and retail); HR-XML (human resources), OPC (process industries); SPEC2000 (aerospace and defense); S.W.I.F.T. (banking); TWIST (treasury); VICS (supply chain management); and XBRL (accounting). Additional information about SAP's support for industry standards can be found at: www.sap.com/platform/netweaver/standardssupport.

Additional information about SAP NetWeaver can be found at:

http://www.sap.com/solutions/netweaver/

SAP News

• SAP Enables Unilever to Drive Implementation of Global Strategy Through Key Integration Technology
  (May 20, 2008)
• SAP Ushers In New Era for Business Process Management
  (May 06, 2008)
• SAP and IDS Scheer Partner to Bring Customers Easier Modeling and Visualization of Enterprise Services
  (March 04, 2008)
• SAP CEO Kagermann Tells Developers Enterprise SOA Delivered; Outlines Great Opportunities to Engage, Contribute and Make Significant Impact
  (October 17, 2007)
• SAP Contributes New Tool to Open Source Eclipse Developer Community
  (October 17, 2007)
• SAP to Acquire YASU Technologies and Add Leading Business Rules Management System to SAP NetWeaver®
  (October 17, 2007)
• Accenture and SAP Payment Platform Excels in Performance Benchmark
  (October 03, 2007)
• SAP Offers Individual Developer Licenses for SAP NetWeaver®Through Online Communities
  (October 02, 2007)
• SAP Management Encourages Developers to Meet the Challenge of Business Network Transformation
  (October 02, 2007)
• SAP Delivers New Capabilities for SAP NetWeaver® To Power Accelerated Business Innovation
  (October 02, 2007)

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