IT is playing a major role in turning business strategy into execution. IT leaders are tasked with enhancing efficiency, while enabling strategy execution quickly.

According to AMR Research, "(most) CIOs are actively working to reduce the diversity in their application portfolios, forcing the business to standardize on a very small set of application vendors. Although some may complain that these policies limit innovation, they do promote stability and reliability, as well as reduce the cost of IT and business operations."*

SAP and our partners provide software and services that enable IT organizations to evolve, consolidate, and govern IT based on business needs:

• Increasing efficiency to ensure continuous operations and managed costs
• Delivering insight and improving performance by establishing IT governance policies
• Increasing flexibility and innovation with the help of enterprise service-oriented architecture

Increasing Efficiency and Making Service-Oriented Architecture Easy

Services- enabled, SAP Business Suite provides thousands of enterprise services that can help you ensure efficient operation of existing processes. These enterprise services help you more easily integrate your business applications or integrate processes across your business network. New enterprise services are delivered as enhancement packages that allow you to evolve your service-oriented architecture at your own pace.

The SAP Services portfolio can help support the entire life cycle of your systems. In particular for upgrades, we offer upgrade value assessments and Unicode conversion services. And safeguarding services can validate implementation projects and mitigate technical risks in upgrades and operations.

Delivering Insight and Improving Performance

SAP and our partners can help you establish policies to ensure IT governance to deliver insight and improve performance. Once policies are defined, you can track and manage risk with SAP's governance, risk, and compliance application for risk management and monitor key controls for business processes with SAP's governance, risk, and compliance application for process control. Finally, you can analyze business information to improve planning and budgeting, get business insight into financial information with, and monitor enterprise performance with SAP solutions for enterprise performance management.

Increasing Flexibility and Innovation

SAP helps you evolve your existing IT infrastructure into a cost-effective environment that can address the growing need for insight, efficiency, and flexibility. Providing the building blocks for a business process platform, SAP's integrated software and services help you unite the integration, deployment, and management of applications, data, processes, and user interfaces in a single, open environment. Powered by SAP NetWeaver, the enterprise service-oriented architecture provides an easy path towards a service-oriented architecture to allow customers to deliver innovation and standardization of their IT environment at the same time. By combining the service-enabled process components of the SAP Business Suite, the Enterprise Services Repository for managing enterprise services from SAP and partners, and the advanced integration and composition capabilities of SAP NetWeaver, SAP delivers the foundation for a business process platform supporting flexibility and innovation.

* Safety First: The Future of Enterprise Applications,” AMR Research, Jim Shepherd, 2006.

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