SAP’s support and cooperation has been an important factor in driving adoption of ISO 20022 and working towards convergence of the finance industry around this important standard, in order to streamline electronic financial networks.

Carlo Palmers Head of Payments Standards Development SWIFT

Industry standards ensure that SAP's platform is open and interoperable with other vendor solutions in heterogeneous IT environments. Today, interoperability is one of the most challenging issues facing enterprises. It is hard to predict what kinds of systems will form a company's business network in the future.

The best way to hedge against this challenge is through industry standards. Working closely with companies in the SAP ecosystem, SAP leads initiatives in business semantic standards (UN/CEFACT), the banking industry, Web services interoperability, and open source support (OSS).

Benefits of industry standards occur only if you take a comprehensive approach that places equal importance on:

• Business semantics standards – Define the information flowing through and between enterprise applications
• Technology standards – Enable systems running those enterprise applications to more easily connect and communicate
• Open source – Provide SAP customers with a choice of technology platforms to use

Visit the SAP Developer Network (SDN) to participate in the discussion around standards and enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).