Vienna, 15 May 2007
SAP began its annual EMEA conference today in Austria. Attended by 8 000 SAP staff, customers, partners, press, analysts and bloggers, the event this year focuses on "business at the speed of change".
Delivering the opening keynote address, SAP chairman and CEO Henning Kagermann highlighted the rapidly evolving global business environment, and the technologies businesses will need to be able to keep up in future.
"We started thinking about the major trends for the next 10 years in 2003," he said, "and, at Sapphire that year, announced we would be breaking up rigid value chains into the adaptive business of the future. Luckily, we're now seeing two major trends that confirm that vision.
"We're seeing an accelerated pace of change. If you speak to companies these days, they all have different growth strategies, but whatever they're touching, it is always faster. Every 20 minutes, there is an M&A transaction, and investors are impatient, companies have no time to integrate, they want see an immediate return. Companies need a platform to speed that up.
"Other companies grow through product innovation. Every 3.5 minutes a new product hits the consumer space; that's twice as many as five years ago. It's tripled shipments. Every 0.1 seconds a container ships. With so many shipments, companies need a multiplier platform.
"To succeed, organisations need an open, extendable, cross-industry platform," he stated. Kagermann added that SAP delivers that platform.
Product transitions
"We started four years ago, when we rolled out the SOA roadmap which we will finish this year. We are ready now. As a basis, we declared that we need a technology platform. We have SAP Netweaver."
Netweaver, he noted, empowers SAP's applications, as well as enabling clients to integrate legacy and non-SAP platforms all-in-one platform. SAP has certified more than 2 000 partners on the Netweaver platform to date.
"This is the only platform in the world that supports Java and .Net; 7 000 production systems rolled out last year."
The next step for SAP is obvious, he said. "You have to innovate in certain dimensions." This innovation, he explained, needs to encompass all processes (not only ERP), all industries, companies of all sizes, and include the power of all of the market's players.
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