By now everyone has been affected by at least one aspect of the advanced Internet technology dubbed ‘Web 2.0‘; it’s the technology that lends a personal touch to what would otherwise be cold information.

This video may help the people out there who are not so familiar with Web 2.0 appreciate this “transition” just a little more.

Person-to-person contact, a major theme in Web 2.0 and in this video, could potentially benefit SAP enterprise software through personalization and most of all comfort. SAP has waited before picking up on these trends until now because blogs and wikis that have the Ajax style functionality have proven their worth by the test of time.

During Kagermann’s keynote he mentioned something about failures in the past in regards to their applications. He goes on to talk about how SAP is supposedly going to slowly and accurately develop material in the future so that everything produced is a success. Of course this kind of talk could be interpreted as “I’m sorry, we’ll do better next time”, but this new adoption of communication truly seems to be a step in the right direction.

In his blog, Michael Cote writes, “I’m beginning to think that ‘Web 2.0′ is set to be the ‘SOA’ for [at least] this year and [possibly for] upcoming years”. Cote also points out that SAP has waited a long time to release this technology and when they launch these applications their users will be asking about what “web 4.0″ has to offer. I agree with Cote, there are new trends that will make their presence known, but to be fair SAP is utilizing the core features of the Web 2.0 revolution that have already proven their worth.

Even though SAP’s applications that utilize these Web 2.0 functions have received mixed reviews, one thing is clear: SAP is serious about Web 2.0.

Read more about how SAP plans to utilize Web 2.0 for the SOA.

Eric Samuels
Assistant Editor

The Web 2.0 video, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us was created by Dr. Michael Wesch, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University.

We received a tremendous amount of reader feedback on veteran site expert Axel Angeli's recent guest editorial SAP under fire: Axel Angeli on why 2007 will be tough for SAP. Here are some of the reader comments and Axel's responses.

"I agree with Axel's assessment that Microsoft Sharepoint will give SAP KM and EP a run for its money. I, with a group of other 'pioneers', have started an ASUG Special Interest Group to investigate and influence the interoperability of Sharepoint and the SAP Enterprise Portal. Many SAP customers will license the Sharepoint MOSS solution over the next few years because it certainly wins the 'beauty contest' and gives SAP a run for its money on robust search functionality.

Where Sharepoint is falling short is tying document management to business process via workflow and transactions. This is where you use Sharepoint for the user interface and document repository, but you run SAP workflow to handle the business processes, like approving documents based on document type and user hierarchies from HR organizational structures. I do not tout myself an expert in this area as we have just begun our journey down the path of interoperability, but I do see this being a relevant space within the SAP-Microsoft ecosystem.

– Name withheld, SAP Business Analyst, Longmont, Colo."

Axel: I am happy to read this comment. I am convinced that something needed to be done in this areas. SAP has all the necessary features including a basic WEBDAV support, allowing one to map any SAP repository data source as a network drive. One should maybe make clear to the Sharepoint newcomers that Sharepoint stands for two completely different elements: the Sharepoint Services and Sharepoint Portal Server. The Sharepoint Services allow reading and writing back documents to a Sharepoint enabled server, while the Sharepoint Portal is a content management system that makes use of Sharepoint Services but otherwise is just another "Portal" and competes with SAP EP in this respect. We integrated Sharepoint Services successfully to open source CMS like Joomla or DRUPAL, hence I don't see a reason why it should not comply with EP as well.

I would love to eventually read more on the progress of your ASUG SIG project and maybe participate on a blog on this.

"First of all, I think SAP didn't drop the ball. I think SAP is doing very good job. SAP has already released its major version ECC 6.0 in 2006. No major releases are due until 2010. So SAP is up to date in all areas of ERP. SAP is ready to complete enterprise SOA technology. More enterprise SOA implementation projects and SAP upgrade projects will be implemented in 2007. As a result, more XI projects will be implemented in 2007 and demand for XI skills increases. Microsoft cannot compete with SAP in the ERP marketplace. They are still far away from SAP's level. Microsoft enters every niche market. That doesn't mean they can compete with SAP in the ERP market.

– Sobhan Annepu, Sr. Programming Analyst at Coca-Cola Bottling Co., Birmingham, Ala."

Axel: Saying that SAP didn't drop the ball may certainly be a matter of how you interpret the situation. I would say that SAP exactly DID drop the ball by putting a moratorium on release upgrades for four years and hence leaving ERP in the current state. It feels like leaving the dish in the kitchen sink after an opulent dinner. A moratorium will exactly be the kind of advantage that the competition is waiting for to dash into the gap.

When it comes to the mid-sized markets, SAP ERP won't win the beauty contest. ECC is strong in features but weak when it comes to agility. For small and diversified production sites, the Microsoft AX "Hub and Spoke" concept appears to be more convincing. If I am asked to give a proper advice in strategy to SAP product life cycle management, I would opt for efforts to break down the SD/MM/PP complex into small objects that can be decorated by the customer at discretion if production is concerned that might be done on the basis of an "APO light".

The weakness of Microsoft is currently the fact that AX (formerly: Axapta) still falls out of the Office licensing scheme and the frightening low number of developers that are familiar with the software. However, the latest release of AX sports a virtual machine and a script-like programming language that speaks for a serious effort to attack the markets of SAP. It might be a correct perception that Microsoft is ready to enter every niche market, but so does SAP.

I acknowledge that there will be an XI boom in 2007 and I already have predicted a shortage in skilled XI technical people. However, I stand firm to my belief that SAP has not yet reached a practical SOA, although I am certain that they are on track and will take over leadership in less than three years from now.

Editor's comment:
As always, we welcome your input. Reply to this post or send your thoughts to mdanielsson@techtarget.com.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

Following the predictions of Logos GmbH founder Axel Angeli and Ventana CEO Mark Smith, it is now time for veteran SAP expert Dale Young to put forth his take on the major SAP trend of 2007. Like Axel's most recent post, Dale chose to do it in the form of a guest editorial.

The key question
Why is the upgrade to mySAP ERP different than those that came before it?

Many SAP customers are at a crossroads for supporting future business needs and realizing the next wave of value from their SAP investment. First of all, today's business environment is VERY different from when they originally put in R/3. There is an increasing amount of business competition, collaboration, globalization, standardization, commoditization and change.  They are likely are faced with new competitors, markets and products and their enterprise solutions must serve a new generation of customers, employees and partners (from generation Y) for whom technology is a normal life skill.

More complexity
Secondly, their original application strategy and enterprise architecture are likely more than five years old.  The ideal "clean" hardware, software, OS and database environments that were targeted with the first install have likely been more complex and less heterogeneous.  Business needs have changed; technology and Web services have matured; and SAP has entered into the architecture, Web enablement and integration space.  Computing infrastructure capabilities have also evolved.  There are significant new opportunities to optimize your enterprise infrastructure. 

Finally, SAP has undergone a "Step Change" in its architecture and solutions.  NetWeaver and Enterprise SOA have emerged as the foundation for all SAP solutions; there are increased capabilities in the areas of data and information management; and new third party capabilities such as Microsoft Duet and Adobe IAF have been introduced. For the first time, the core business content that has been developed over the last 30 years by SAP will be available for an open, standards-based world. Also, SAP functional solutions have evolved and matured.  There are opportunities to take advantage of new functionality across the entire SAP solution suite and to simplify your overall enterprise architecture through additional legacy solutions retirement.

What does all this add up to?
When looking at all these factors together, you can see that this upgrade is different.  SAP customers are at a unique point in time where they can set the direction for their enterprise solutions for the next decade.  At first, this may seem to be a daunting task and very few enterprises have the luxury or can afford the risk of a wholesale rebuild.  Most organizations are following an "evolutionary" approach to dealing with this business revolution.

Dale Young, Vice President
North American SAP Alliance Leader

Editor's comment:
Do you agree with Dale on this being the number one trend for 2007? Is it really that vital to upgrade? Do you trust the new lineup of feature-packed NetWeaver toys, or do you prefer to sit back and see what happens? Sound off and send your thoughts to mdanielsson@techtarget.com today!

Matt Danielsson
Editor 

Axel Angeli is a veteran SAP guru with a reputation for brutal honesty about the ERP market. You probably saw his predictions for SAP trends 2007 the other week. Well, Axel had more insights to share about what's going on in the SAP world, so we gave him the opportunity to write a guest editorial! Also don't miss the follow-up columns SAP under fire: Axel responds and SAP under fire: Axel speaks out on what SAP should do next.

The broad strokes
For SAP AG, the year 2007 will be the most critical one in the recent history. While the company is still working on revamping its product line, the competitors are preparing to attack. While the ABAP engine makes slight progress, the ERP components still wait for many enhancements requested by customers. This negligence will play well into the hands of SAP challengers, mainly Microsoft with its Dynamics AX, the latest version of AXAPTA.

Not surprisingly, SOA will continue to be the driving subject in IT as companies begin to have a clearer vision of SOA benefits and governance and they start XI implementations in masses, driving the market into a proper shortage in XI consultants.

CRM and BW are fairly saturated so the business is ready to concentrate on another trend topic: the Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) field.

Looking beyond SAP, we see a steep incline in interest for Knowledge Management (Content Management Systems, CMS) and collaboration tools for project management, appliances and Open Source Public License solutions.

SOA rising
2007 will be the year of the practical break-through of the Service Oriented Architecture. While 2006 was governed by SOA governance concerns, I expect a great number of real life implementations to take place. SAP marketing did too good work here. The number of companies that have scheduled XI implementations is rapidly growing — a development that might bring SAP into trouble when it comes to support them all. XI is still not mature enough to be an out-of-the-box solution. The product kernel is widely stable but there are still missing precautions to cope with data affluence and adapter misbehavior.

These problems can now be circumvented by using safe implementation practices and sober asynchronous architecture, but the number of experienced XI architectures is extremely sparse and education in best practices of SOA has hardly started. Given that middleware XI projects are likely to be mission critical, this situation will mean heavy sea for SAP and give a chance to competitors to step into the gap. As of today, XI implementations are fine but in heavy-duty solutions an architecture is good advice if XI is complemented with some best of breed tools like IBM MQ as message store, Seeburger or SmartEDI for any EDI solution and relying on Windows framework as an adapter engine for everything beyond ODBC/jDBC.

ERP status quo
In the ERP area, there won't be tremendous changes this year because companies are mainly occopied with SOA issues or with upgrading and consolidating their current installations. Nevertheless, SAP will see its first serious challenges. Microsoft AXAPTA has loaded their arsenal to attack the market shares of SAP in the higher end of the SMB market benefiting widely from the intransparent pricing policy of SAP's SMB approach.  

Content Management gaining importance
Content and knowledge management has been neglected for a long time.

With the growing number of Internet literates, there will be an increasing insight that Google-like search engines, agile document management systems like Wikipedia, blogs and shared data repositories are precious tools for project management as well.

When you look for any kind of information today, you look it up in the Internet via Google, Yahoo, A9 or Wikipedia — and in most cases, you find a satisfying solution. The document management within companies, however, still takes place in the file system. Documents are distributed via email and finding back information is normally a nightmare. But now Internet technology reaches the intranet as well.

Google gave it a start with its enterprise version of the search engine. It comes preinstalled and configured in a hardware blade server that simply needs to be connected to power and a network and it starts spidering the documents within the reach in the intranet. From there on you have Google search functionality on the internal documents. SAP will use its advantage that its software is already ubiquitous in enterprises to present the solution manager and its knowledge management as an alternative. But the appeal of the plug-and-play offer of the Google appliance will be hard to beat. From the pure software side, Microsoft SharePoint will be an honest contender to SAP KM and EP.

Editor's comment:
Do you agree with Axel's assessment? Did SAP drop the ERP ball? Is Microsoft poised to give SAP a hard time? Are we at the beginning of a CMS boom? Will there be happy days for XI consultants this year? Sound off on these issues to win a book bundle:

• SAP xApp Analytics
• Designing Composite Applications
• Job Scheduling for SAP

One lucky winner takes all, so send your thoughts to mdanielsson@techtarget.com today.
UPDATE: Rob Ericsson from L10 Systems is the lucky winner of the book bundle. The raffle is over, but we're always interested to hear your opinion so feel free to keep sending additional comments.

Matt Danielsson
Editor

Here at SearchSAP.com, we just got our hands on the latest service-oriented architecture (SOA) book titled Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver and mySAP ERP, by Scott Campbell and Vamsi Mohun. This recently published SOA resource details SAP's roadmap for Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) as distinguished by SAP. 

By now, most SAP-run businesses are cautiously meandering their way down the much touted ESA roadmap — it's only been four years – but much apprehension preceeds them. Campbell and Mohun strive to overcome the anxiety for companies by laying to rest myths surfacing around ESA. 

Two ESA myths debunked

1. SOA and ESA share the same concept with ESA having more direction. SOA is an industry term while ESA is SAP's enterprise term for SOA. It comes across ambigious, especially since SAP decided to rename ESA to Enterprise SOA to alleviate confusion, but instead compounded it with yet another term to add to the pot. Both SOA and ESA are being created and recognized across the IT world as the next platform for business process excellence. Basically, both terms can be defined as a full set of business processes tailored to a company based around many applications. The main reason SAP has distinquished their SOA plan is because SAP incorporates SOA with "industry-driven service models" making the package more robust and unique. So, SOA and ESA are similiar — same in concept — but different in practice.

2. Another misconception business' have about ESA is that there is an end to the roadmap and a final product that will be shelved and sold. This is simply not accurate. The whole concept of SOA and ESA is to continue to build and evolve best industry business solutions. As time ushers in improvements and updated technologies, so ESA will adapt and reposition itself accordingly. Independent software vendors (ISVs) will continue to introduce corresponding software and upgrades will continue to be a way of life. The bottom line is, ESA can start now, without the latest upgrade. Some existing R/3 components can support pilot parts of ESA. This is being herald as the best way to — let's say practice — ESA before having to upgrade and commit. If you are already running NetWeaver, even more opportunities exist to trail run with ESA.

So, rest assure that ESA is important and more than just SOA. In fact, it should be practiced today for a future commitment. Put your ESA fears to bed and realize that ESA is just another SOA option.

Look for more from Campbell and Mohun's Mastering Enterprise SOA with SAP NetWeaver and mySAP ERP from SearchSAP.com in the future.

Juli Austin
Assistant Editor

We are pleased to bring to you the SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI) All-In-One guide. SAP XI is one of the mandatory four components that make up the NetWeaver platform. SAP XI is used for B2B and application-to-application integration. Consider it a superhighway for all enterprise advanced communications. Not only does SAP XI connect systems within an organization and among third-party vendors, but it also houses SAP's Business Process Management (BPM) unit and is a launching point for the service-oriented architecture. Check out some examples:

My version of 'XI 3.0 for Dummies'
What is the future of ALE/EDI and IDocs, in light of XI
Why BPM is good for you

This SAP XI All-In-One guide is your one-stop reference for all things SAP XI. Bookmark this guide because as NetWeaver and XI continue to grow, so will this guide.

Enjoy!
Juli Austin
Assistant Editor

Project Argo will result in an SAP xApp, a composite application, which leverages the existing back-end search technology SAP call’s TREX, (Text Retrieval and Classification). TREX is an indexing capability within NetWeaver. The Argo application will sit on top of NetWeaver and TREX and it can be integrated with other SAP applications allowing an SAP end-user to get quick answers out of SAP via a desktop widget, a Web browser or even a mobile device.

SAP is calling Project Argo part of its software solutions for information workers. So, SAP plans to target field service technicians or a sales person out in the field with this search product. For example, these employees can conduct a search on their mobile devices in the same fashion a Google search is conducted and call up e-mails, reports and even SAP transactions.

“Argo is completely open ended and extensible. It will allow you to connect to other search services or other kinds of APIs,” said Dennis Moore, general manager of emerging systems at SAP. “Anything that can be querried through an API or Web service can be queried through Argo.”

SAP said that Argo will also be tied into Duet, SAP’s joint product developed with Microsoft that ties many SAP end-user tasks with Microsoft Outlook. Project Argo will also be used in SAP’s new Muse, updated GUI, which users were given a sneak peek of at the Sapphire ’06 conference in Orlando, Fla.

SAP has been using Argo internally for some time and has even hooked it up to external search services such as Google News.

We still don’t know if Argo will be released as a xApp that can be purchased separately, or if it will be packaged as an update to Duet in the third quarter or even an extension to Muse when it is officially released.

A story with more details will be available at SearchSAP.com
-Rob Westervelt

Project Argo is SAP's extension of its enterprise search capabilities. Below is a screenshot of the SAP Developer Network download page for the beta version of Argo. The page was made public, but SAP has since placed it behind a login wall. The DVD is being distributed to a select few Sapphire user conference attendees in Paris, according to the site. While details are still slim, what we do know is that Argo will extend search to Google and other search services via Web services.