TechnologyDriven

SAP TechEd in Las Vegas is over. Not surprisingly in today’s Web 2.0 world, there has been a lot of blogging, podcasting and videos around the event, and Craig Cmehil has summarized those a little bit. I’d also like to resume some of the announcements and news from TechEd I find the most interesting here.

Tim O’Reilly did a guest keynote about the business models of Web 2.0-companies, and in his own blog he wrote about the Web 2.0 activities going on at SAP, like for example activities in Second Life, and their own internal social network called “harmony” (never heard of that before).

The executive keynotes of Peter Zencke and Vishal Sikka were mainly about Enterprise SOA, delivering new functionality for the business suite via enhancement packages and the switch framework, and new features of NetWeaver 7.1 (”Enterprise Services Repository”, “Process Integration” as advancement of Exchange Infrastructure and the “Composition Environment”). To make a long story short, it’s all about code-free modeling of processes, applications and user-interfaces based on services in a central repository today. You can read more about it on ZDNet and in Jeff Nolan’s post.

There also was an announcement of the SDN subscription program, which allows developers to get the SAP NetWeaver tools and platforms for an annual fee, similar to offers from other software vendors (e.g. MSDN). This is meant to enlarge the SAP developer community. Michael Koch wrote more about it.

So, this was TechEd in Las Vegas, but TechEd Munich is just around the corner. And:

Only on thursday, though, expensive enough…
Technorati: sap blogger

The TechEd 07 in Las Vegas has started, and Peter Zencke unveiled some more technical details about SAP Business ByDesign (BBD) in his keynote and an interview with Dan Farber.

Some key points:

• Everything is built on services (UI is built on services also, there no integration of components on the database-level like in R/3 but on the service-level)
• SAP will not allow to run custom code in the hosted environment, but customers can run code on their own site, e.g. compose new applications based on the hosted services
• AJAX-functionality is not included in the UI for BBD at the moment, but it will come
• The basic foundation for BBD is ABAP (Objects), having “one implementation for each function”. The layers above are done with Java, based on (and partially automatically generated from) models.
• “Customizing” is done with a configurator, with a “question and answer and constraint engine”, not on the level of process models
• Linux is used as operating system for the hosted environment, and SAP’s own MaxDB as database

Technorati: sap blogger

Today SAP officially announced it’s new on-demand Enterprise Software for small and mid-sized businesses called “Business ByDesign” (BBD), which was formerly known as “A1S”, in a press-conference in New York.

CEO Henning Kagermann called it “the most important announcement” of his career and described BBD as “breakthrough innovation”. In fact, the SaaS-market is completely new for SAP but probably very important for it’s future, and BBD is perhaps the most important product for SAP since R/3, which made the German software-vendor to the market-leader in business software in the 90’s. And the way BBD was designed and built is truly innovative. It is completely service-based (”SOA by design”, also the UI is based on services in contrast to ERP where the services are delivered additionally to the transactions), and it was built with the latest model-based development tools from SAP (Composition Environment).

An often heard (see also Nicholas Carr’s post) question/thought is whether BBD could threaten SAP’s own business. Larger companies running SAP’s rather expensive ERP or Business Suite could also think of using a cheap and easy to implement on-demand software, what by the way would also challenge a whole industry of consultants implementing and adapting SAP software for customers. But those larger businesses will probably always have the need for a wider adaption of their enterprise software than possible with BBD, and for SAP it’s still better to loose customers to themselves than to loose them to competitors…

The replay of the press-conference can be found here.

Further informations:

• http://www.sap.com/solutions/sme/businessbydesign/index.epx
• http://sap.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/09/19/a1s-is-now-sap-business-bydesign/

Technorati: sap blogger

The social bookmarking service del.icio.us, one of the first and most famous Web2.0-sites, is about to redesign it’s user-interface and to introduce some new features. There’s a preview available at http://preview.delicious.com, but only for invited users.

Some of the planned new features include extended sorting options for bookmarks, bulk tag editing, better organization and sorting of friends and watched people and a new search engine.

(from TechCrunch)

Already last year Hasso Plattner had a lecture at his “Hasso Plattner Institute” (HPI) about the so called composite applications, applications “that sit on other applications” as he said, with no own data storage.

He gave an overview of what composite applications are and illustrated this with the example of Duet, a joint project of Microsoft and SAP to integrate Microsoft Office and SAP applications. I would say this is more an example of an integration of two systems than an example of a composite application, but at least it shows how relatively easy applications can be built with the help of standardized services, on top of web-based platforms (NetWeaver and .Net).
Technically an integration has always been possible Plattner outlined, but nowadays it is easier because of the standardized protocols (e.g. SOAP) and the systematization of application integration.

Nevertheless, there are some issues to consider when composite applications are built (and just as well when systems are integrated):

• User-experience consistency: which UI-guideline is to use, e.g. that of Microsoft or that of SAP?
• Data model overlaps: the data of which system is to use, when there are overlaps?
• Process overlaps: every software has some functionality, perhaps overlapping with other systems, and will obtain new functions in the future. So only the core-processes have to be combined.
• Joint configuration: to stay in the example of Duet: MS Office has extensive configuration options, and there are thousands of customizing tables in SAP. To bring the two systems together the configuration has to match.
• Life-cycle synchronization: every software has a release-cycle, perhaps one system changes and the other does not change accordingly.

Finally, as he likes to do very often, Plattner brought an example from the automotive industry, pointing the way for the software industry: in earlier days there were radios with their own brand in cars, nowadays the radios have the “user-interface” of the cars, but the car-manufacturers still don’t produce radios on their own. This would also occur in software-industry, Plattner predicted, software would consist of services (= components) of different manufacturers, and there would be a consistent UI on top the respective application-suite.

A video of the lecture (in German) can be found here:
http://www.hpi-potsdam.com/index.php/2006/07/05/summer-term-2006-composite-applications/

Technorati: sap blogger

A new online music player called Spool.fm is out there since a few weeks. It has a nice and clear AJAX-based user-interface, and a tidy feature called “listen with a friend” that allows you to share a song you listen to with a friend in real-time!

I am wondering where they take all the songs from?

(from SocialMash (german))

The SAPPHIRE 07 took place a few weeks ago in Atlanta, time to sum up some news and announcements from there:

• SAP and Adobe will deliver an e-learning suite, integrated in SAP ERP, to offer online-trainings within the SAP environment
• New features of the coming NetWeaver-Release:
  • “State-of-the-art user-experience”: The SAPGUI-successor “NetWeaver Business Client” (aka “Project Muse“), an enhanced and more ergonomic user-interface for the Portal (with the help of AJAX), and some Web2.0-functions within the portal like e.g. a wiki-system
  • Support for the new Java EE 5 standard
  • NetWeaver “Process Integration” (PI), formerly Exchange Infrastructure (XI), contains new features (e.g. Business Activity Monitoring) and performance improvements
  • NetWeaver “Composition Environment” (CE), a Java-based modeling- and development environment (including and bundling together WebDynpro, Visual Composer and Composite Application Framework)
• SAP will continue the cooperation with Microsoft on Duet, bringing some new features in the upcoming releases, like connection to SAP CRM and SCM, a development platform to build own integration scenarios and integration with MS Sharepoint
• There was not much talk about “A1S”, the coming on-demand solution for the mid-market. Probably the launch of the product is postponed to 2008, Q1 or even later. A1S has it’s own code-base, but is based on NetWeaver like other SAP solutions. It will contain a set of web-services which allow to build own extensions for the standard-product, although it is hosted on SAP-servers. There will also be a kind of market-place for these extensions, comparable to the “AppExchange” of salesforce.com.
• “mySAP ERP 2005″ is now called “SAP ERP 6.0″. Back to the roots…

Sources and continuative links:
http://searchsap.blog-city.com/sapphire_2007_quick_takes.htm
http://searchsap.blog-city.com/sapphire_2007_quick_takes_part_2.htm
http://blog.danmcweeney.com/24
http://www.accmanpro.com/2007/04/24/sapphire-07-day-1-the-wrap/
http://www11.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?PressID=7615
http://www.ekampf.com/blog/2007/04/24/DuetAtSapphire.aspx
http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?PressID=7597
http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?PressID=7690
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=4903
http://sapport.blogspot.com/2007/04/all-in-one-a1s-business-suite.html
http://www.accmanpro.com/2007/04/27/amr-sees-a1s-confusion-reigns/

Technorati: sap blogger

Google recently launched a service called “MyMaps” which allows you to easily create map mashups (provided that you have a Google account).

“Users are able to create their own maps and mark them public or private. The annotation tools that are provided are very simple and easy to use. Users are able to add lines, polygons and placemarks. They can edit those placemarks with HTML, images, and video. Once a map is created it is very easy to share it and syndicate it via KML. Items found during a local search can be added to a map with a click. Places found via GeoRSS or KML files can also be added to a map.”

(from O’Reilly Radar)

The nice little mashup “Last.tv” let’s you watch videos from YouTube that match the music of your (or another) last.fm account.

Yahoo! recently released a new service called “Pipes“, which allows to visually build mashups, i.e. mix, merge and sort data from different RSS-sources into a single RSS-feed, called the “pipe”.

Pipes are created in a visual editor (which you can see above), so no programming skills are necessary to access the data-sources and combine them. This visual tool is very similar to a tool called “Visual Composer” from SAP, which you can see here:

With Visual Composer you can build applications based on SAP function-modules or web-services, also without writing a single line of code.

Probably no end-user will create those kind of mashups or composed applications, it is still to “technical” to do it, but it makes it much easier for people who are skilled to do so. Therefore a large number of those apps will be available, each one adapted and optimized for it’s single purpose, perhaps combined of other apps, so the end user has a bigger chance to get what he just needs.

(from O’Reilly Radar)

Technorati: yahoo pipes mashups web2.0