SAP’s Agassi Outlines ESA

ORLANDO, Fla.—It’s not common to hear impromptu applause during a keynote address—especially at a tech conference—but applause there was during Shai Agassi’s May 17 speech at Sapphire, SAP AG’s annual user conference.

With little fanfare, the SAP executive board member stepped on the stage and quickly launched into a software demonstration of a company placing a rush order for big screen TVs.

With the click of a laptop button, a report appeared on the screen, displaying what those in the know knew to be critical information for the buyer placing the order.

Applause rippled up through the audience culminating in the front rows closest to Agassi.

“That wasn’t BI [business intelligence],” said Agassi. “That was mySAP ERP 2005.”

SAP launched the mySAP ERP on May 17, at this year’s Sapphire event here in Orlando.

Agassi then put up an old slide—maybe from Sapphire ’03—that outlined SAP’s ESA (Enterprise Services Architecture).

ESA is SAP’s services-based architecture that it has designed its products around, and is advocating for customers.

It’s the SOA (service oriented architecture) strategy SAP announced about three years ago—a drum beat that SAP has sounded resolutely since ESA’s announcement on Jan. 15, 2003.

“This is the classic ESA slide that shows the power of ESA. We are not departing from that,” said Agassi. “That was the enabler for what we put in place, and I wanted to reintroduce that.”

What SAP has put in place since it first introduced the concept of ESA is the underlying technology platform, NetWeaver—essentially a middleware platform that takes on development, master data management and integration, among other infrastructure components.

At the same time, SAP’s componentized its applications—or at least is well down the road—and created the first ERP suite (mySAP ERP 2005, released May 17) that encompasses ESA and NetWeaver.

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