SAP Promises Stable Road Map for MySAP ERP

LAS VEGAS—The big take-away for users at this year’s annual TechEd conference Sept. 12-15 here is the fact that SAP is “stabilizing” its next-generation ERP suite—for the next five years.

Any upgrades to the MySAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) 2005 suite, announced in May, will come in the form of enhancement packages that customers can choose to implement or not—without touching the core MySAP ERP platform (which, it seems, is now the Business Process Platform SAP has been talking about).

The goal, according to Shai Agassi, head of application development at SAP, is to keep customers’ backbone stable while at the same time enabling innovation.

The enhancement packages will be topical releases that sit on top of the core MySAP platform and include things such as new composite applications, services and functional upgrades. The packages will not come randomly, but rather will have a specific topic—travel management or procurement, for example—and users can decide how they want to add them.

Agassi said that he envisions SAP introducing one or two enhancement packages a quarter, and at the end of five years users will get all of them in a single shot. To avoid complications with testing and upgrades, SAP is working on a test framework, similar to its Switch Framework, that will come out with the individual enhancement packages.

“If you did 20 different packages, you would have a hard time [with testing and upgrades], but if you did two or three, then moved on the next big release,” it shouldn’t be an issue, according to Agassi.

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