SAP Continues to Deliver on the Value of Enterprise SOA
SAP Announces Availability of First Enhancement Package for mySAP™ ERP and Further Details Road Map
LAS VEGAS - December 04, 2006 - Continuing to deliver on its commitment to enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the availability of the first SAP enhancement package for mySAP™ ERP and disclosed further details of innovations being delivered under its evolved road map for mySAP ERP. The first enhancement package is now available to customers running mySAP ERP 2005 as part of their license and maintenance agreement. This first enhancement package makes SAP one of the first vendors to fully leverage enterprise SOA for both software design and delivery. Customers can now consume new functionality and enterprise services in a continuous fashion, allowing them to drive business process innovation while maintaining the stability of their core enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The announcement was made at SAP’s fourth annual Analyst Summit, being held in Las Vegas, December 4-5.
SAP first announced its evolved road map for mySAP ERP at SAP® TechEd ’06 Las Vegas in September. (See Sept. 12, 2006 announcement, titled “SAP Delivers Innovation Without Disruption to mySAP™ ERP Customers.”) The delivery of SAP enhancement packages for mySAP ERP meets customer requirements for innovation without disruption by making it simpler and faster to adopt new product functionality, industry-specific features and enterprise services while shielding them from the complexity of multiple upgrades. Moving forward, enhancements to mySAP ERP through 2010 will be made available as extensions to mySAP ERP 2005 in a series of optional enhancement packages. A first in the industry, mySAP ERP 2005—together with SAP NetWeaver® and enterprise SOA—serves as a stable business process platform on top of which these enhancement packages will enable continuous business innovation.
“We appreciate the new five-year upgrade cycle for mySAP ERP 2005,” said Alfons Wahlers, chairman of the board, Deutsche SAP Anwender Gruppe (DSAG, the German SAP users’ group). “This will stabilize the SAP planning cycle and reduce future migration costs for new releases, and it gives customers time to get used to enterprise SOA technology. Therefore we highly recommend implementing mySAP ERP 2005. With this step, businesses are able to lay the foundation to leverage this next generation of ERP software and enterprise services architecture.”
The optional enhancement packages can be configured in a completely modular fashion by enabling customers to activate or “switch on” only the new features and functionalities they want. This enables customers to easily take advantage of continuous innovation without the disruption of multiple, major system upgrades.
Contents of First Enhancement Package
The first enhancement package includes hundreds of enterprise services that enable functional enhancements for human capital management and financials applications, as well as specific industry enhancements for the retail and manufacturing industries.
- Innovations in mySAP™ ERP Human Capital Management. New service level agreements monitoring and employee interaction center analytics help increase the service level of the human resources (HR) organization to its internal customers (employees) and help reduce costs by decreasing non-productive HR staff time.
- Innovations in mySAP™ ERP Financials. Improved functionality for credit and collection management includes credit report monitoring, collections management analytics and enterprise services that enable the integration to external credit information providers for greater efficiencies in the invoice-to-cash process.
- Innovations for the industries. Building upon SAP’s leadership position in delivering industry-specific ERP capabilities, the first enhancement package provides industry-specific innovations including:
- Demand management and POS integration for the retail industry. The first enhancement package integrates SAP’s recent acquisitions of Triversity’s point-of-sale (POS) and Khimetric’s pricing optimization solutions into ERP in order to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and enable retail customers to quickly and easily improve profitability through a better understanding of customer demand and direct connectivity to point-of-sale data.
- Innovations for adaptive manufacturing. The integration of manufacturing execution systems (MES), manufacturing work instructions, and quality management into the ERP system provides real-time visibility into production processes that may be spread across the globe.
“mySAP ERP delivers a cost-effective, low-risk and evolutionary path to the industry’s first service-enabled suite of enterprise applications,” said Tobias Dosch, vice president of ERP Application Solution Management, SAP. “This new approach to enhancement delivery further leverages enterprise SOA as the blueprint for mySAP ERP to enable customers to easily adopt ongoing innovations while maintaining the stability they require with their core business systems.”
For more information about the latest version of mySAP ERP, please refer to the announcement titled “SAP Delivers Next Evolution of Flagship ERP; Provides Users with More Choice and Enhanced Usability,” issued May 17, 2006 at SAPPHIRE® ’06 Orlando, or visit www.sap.com/erp.
Road Map Details
SAP intends to deliver two to three enhancement packages per year. These can contain both functional and technical enhancements as well as enterprise services for mySAP ERP. Each of these “waves of innovation” will have a primary focus on addressing specific customers’ end-to-end-business requirements. These innovations will be concentrated in areas such as user interface simplification, helping companies effectively manage talent, improving financial collaboration, and expanding the already extensive industry-specific capabilities in mySAP ERP. Each enhancement package will also include enterprise services for a particular business scenario, the definition of these services in the enterprise service repository, and applications consuming those services – including composites where available and all the documentation required for customers to get up and running quickly. This documentation is being delivered via an interactive Wiki format.
“The new five-year upgrade cycle for mySAP ERP makes it easier for customers to
deploy new technology and maximize their software investments as they redesign their business processes,” said Albert Pang, director of enterprise applications research at IDC. “This release cycle and strategy simplifies adoption of new enhancements and it matches the needs of customers who typically want to plan and perform an upgrade every five to seven years.”
About SAP
SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software*. Today, more than 36,200 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP® applications—from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize enterprises to suite offerings for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver® platform to drive innovation and enable business change, SAP software helps enterprises of all sizes around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP solution portfolios support the unique business processes of more than 25 industries, including high tech, retail, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol “SAP.” (Additional information at <http://www.sap.com>)
(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, product life-cycle management and supplier relationship management.
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