27 October 2009 News

 

SAP sees 'On demand' in demand

Dan Barnes, Vienna

Jim Hagemann Snabe, member of the Executive Board of SAP and Marge Breya, executive vice president and general manager of the Intelligence Platform Group at SAP, opened the SAP Tech Ed event in Vienna, stating they would address three main areas; efficiency, flexibility and people, with the philosophy that "innovation and change depends upon stability".

Obviously these must be applied judiciously, "You don't want flexibility in accounting - Enron tried it" joked Snabe, but translating this big picture concept into the world of software means SAP is developing an open architecture using minimal middleware or ‘thin orchestration' between systems, apparently in contrast to its rival Oracle, and is looking to provide applications on demand. This provision is being built using fixed core underlying processes - essentially the SAP Business Suite - over the top of which applications and their upgrades can be delivered on demand, minimising disruption to the business using the apps.

While there are clearly some strong manufacturing, oil & gas, retail and pharmaceutical customers present, there were few new financial services clients in view. Snabe said that "Because of the financial crisis that started in banking there is a need for real time information systems in banks has increased while the architecture of layering systems over systems has increased dramatically." As proof fo the company's commitment to the sector, he pointed to the company's loan origination solution and its well established, but less well adopted, core banking system saying that the company was seeing significant traction, but that "The challenge is that the replacement is not something you do overnight."

Breya also pointed to a growth in interest in analytics and "Around master data management in financial services", both core strengths of SAP since its acquisition of Business Objects, with whom Breya joined SAP, in 2007.

Discussing the partnership with Teradata  announced in April, she noted "I can't tell you how many customers are moving their Oracle databases over to Teradata and we're working with those guys to have the analytics associated with joint operations. This is in-memory management brought to a system level now."