The rhetoric of openness reached new heights last week at JavaOne, when SAP co-chairman Hasso Plattner called for "a community of developers building applications that can work together across many systems." And he backed that up by announcing that SAP's application server would soon become J2EE 1.3 compliant.
Why would Plattner sing a tune that clashes with the usual buy-it-all-from-us ERP philosophy? In part he's just facing up to the fact that customers now demand both choice and easy interoperability. SAP has been talking up open standards since November, when he promised that the company's mySAP portal and B2B exchange offerings would integrate via Java and Web services. Also, a true J2EE app server provides a convenient platform for customization, so that Java developers can extend the functionality of SAP's core ERP applications. Of course, corporations have already sunk an estimated $10 billion into development with ABAP, SAP's proprietary development language. But Java has the momentum and SAP is getting with the times.
Plattner's comments are part of a string of relatively visionary pronouncements from SAP, one of the world's largest software companies but normally a conservative one. Last fall, along with Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, SAP launched one of the first large, public UDDI directories for Web services. In addition, SAP is on the board of the Web Services Interoperability Organization and was listed as one of the initial supporters of SOAP and WSDL when they were submitted to the W3C. In advance of JavaOne, SAP joined IBM, BEA, Sun, Oracle, and several others in supporting an extension to J2EE that standardizes portal servers--a critical area for SAP, whose Enterprise Portal provides a business intelligence hub for the company's component ERP applications.
Make no mistake, SAP--along with other top ERP vendors Oracle, PeopleSoft, and J.D. Edwards--still want to sell you as much of their extended ERP suites as they can, from core financials all the way to fancy new Product Lifecycle Management packages. But shrewdly, they also understand that interoperability goes both ways. App servers and Web services may open up ERP data to exploitation by "foreign" applications, yet by the same token, data from outside applications can surface within the portal software that is becoming central to ERP. And if there's one thing at which the ERP guys excel, it's giving management users a detailed, rolled-up analysis of business activity. ERP may be out of fashion, but interoperability may well help lend "legacy" ERP software new life.
Would the ability to move data easily in and out of an ERP system change your view of the behemoth? Why or why not? E-mail Eric or Talk Back below.
