myERP 2005 as Business Process Platform
The key message from Shai Agassi's keynote the roadmap for myERP 2005, defined by simplicity and innovation.
Shai discussed the challenge of a CIO who needs to innovate quarterly but only wants to touch the infrastructure once every five years (on a Saturday, no less). The solution is to deliver a stable core with incremental updates available as enhancement packages. This will allow companies to innovate on business demands rather than technical ones, deploying updates as they need them instead of trying to absorb major changes in the platform. The stable core will be myERP 2005, their business process platform released in June. As Peter Graf put it, we want to solidify the foundation so we can focus on move the standards up the stack, shifting from technical standards to higher-level standards built around business processes.
Enhancement Packages will allow innovation to be delivered by SAP itself, partners, and customers. SAP will release the first Enhancement Pack in December 2006. Tapping into the success of the SDN and ASUG communities, they expect to built a strong ecosystem of third-party innovation through the xApps Hub. The xApps Hub links the entire business process community and allows customers to consume this intelligence.
Shai emphasized repeatedly the importance of upgrading to myERP 2005, but said it should not be painful. They are providing an upgrade path, including a Solutions Browser which will automate the creation of business cases. From their experience, 92% of the upgrades were completed on time and 94% were completed under budget.
Enterprise Search with SAP ARGO
The second important announcement is SAP Argo. By exploiting knowledge of existing relationships, Argo unlocks deep enterprise search that goes beyond text search in documents and web pages. Argo is also aware of roles and entitlements of the individual, a limitation I've seen in many of the other enterprise search systems. Argo's competitive advantage is that, compared to Google, it already understands your relational data model and the deep semantics between these elements.
Argo is available for download today on SDN. It will be be available commercially next year and the price point has not been announced yet.
Discovery and Composition
Next two releases are closely related: the Discovery System and the Composition Environemnt. The Discovery System allows people to "play around" with the system without affecting production enterrpise systems and is available today directly from HP. The Composition Environemnt is a plugin for NetWeaver. This release is a preview and available today.
More to come.