SAP: Adaptability 'key to success'

SAP plans to venture into new sectors with special focus on the public and financial sectors, says Maphum Nxumalo, SAP Africa's director of business development and corporate affairs.

Nxumalo officially opened the South African leg of the Best of SAP World Tour at Gallagher Estate in Midrand yesterday.

Although highlighting the latest enhancements to the mySAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver products, the focus of this year's event was meeting the changing needs of business and the role SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) will play in future IT ecosystems.

ESA is SAP's version of services-oriented architecture (SOA), which SAP is backing as the key to putting business in control of information technology to enable better business processes.

"The focus is shifting from pure cost reduction to reducing the time it takes for enterprises to be able to change their business processes to meet new market demands," said Thomas Bauer, senior VP for SAP Germany.

Bauer explained that in SAP's view, ESA was essential to innovation and had become the Web services-oriented blueprint on which all product development was now based. "Having great ideas is useless without the ability to execute them.

"World business is moving away from transactional platforms to business process platforms to accommodate change and innovation," said Bauer.

"Innovation at a business process level is the only guaranteed way of achieving competitive advantage because new products are easily copied," said Simon Carpenter, director of strategic initiatives for SAP Africa.

Carpenter said in today's business world collaboration and integration were of vital importance to remaining competitive. "ESA plays a critical role by providing a new architecture that can keep pace with rapidly changing world market conditions," he said.