Five Key Software Trends for Companies to Watch
SAP Executive Shai Agassi spoke to more than 1,500 technology leaders at the annual Software 2006 event about trends he is seeing in the marketplace.
- We believe that for I.T. to deliver the flexibility organizations need, it must create a single, unified platform that provides a repository of coherent services.
- We believe the market has shifted from point solutions to industry-flavored suites.
- We believe people like their current user experience but want business process content to be part of it.
- We believe ecosystems that reuse common services deliver more, faster and cheaper innovation than any single vendor.
- We believe I.T. will become strategic to the business as the pace of process innovation accelerates.
“One of the things we’re doing right now is opening up our technology platform to partners, including developers and integrators, which allow them to build their unique apps on top of our platform,” Agassi highlighted. “SAP’s platform provides a single repository of enterprise services, where the entire ecosystem can leverage our technology by building the solutions that are needed for every customer.”
Agassi continued, “The days of buying point products are long behind us. Five years from now, customers will only buy suites. You won’t purchase individual point products such as ERP, CRM, supply chain management or HR applications that will ship to you as separate entities and that will end up as a collection of services that you need to manage. Customers are looking to drive a higher level of value out of their industry flavored, enterprise software solutions and they are doing this through deploying application suites.”
“The goal is to provide business workers and information workers with the data they need in order to make informed and intelligent decisions quickly. Our customers want basic, simple and powerful solutions, and this can be achieved through delivering an easy-to-use interface and hiding complexity in the background,” added Agassi. “SAP’s strategy is to help customers empower their people to leverage the skills they already have and embed in all the user experiences they already are comfortable with. So whether it is a portal, desktop productivity tools or alternative interfaces—mobile devices, RSS, RFID, analytics, embedded devices—the focus is around bringing relevant business context to that preferred user interface. These employees can leverage the skills they already have, like working in Microsoft Office. We teamed up with Microsoft to jointly deliver ‘Project Mendocino,’ which brings the best of desktop productivity and best enterprise applications without cost of integration.”
“The SAP Developer Network has more than a half million unique visitors a month, including 1,000 ISVs developing on our platform, and these numbers are growing quickly,” highlighted Agassi. “SAP’s platform ecosystem is critical to our success as we continue to deliver more solutions to more customers in more industries. By providing a solid foundation for our partners that is based on an industry-standard design, we’re driving co-innovation in the market that has never been seen before,” Agassi said. “During the coming year, you’ll see even greater acceleration in our partner ecosystem space.”
“The industry has changed more in the past five years than in the previous two decades,” said Agassi in closing. “And we don’t see the pace of innovation slowing anytime soon. As we approach this next wave, businesses will be challenged to adapt faster to changes in their competitive landscape in order to serve their customers’ ever-changing needs. The companies that have invested properly in I.T. infrastructure will have the ability to handle the market changes; the companies that invest in enterprise services architecture will accelerate ahead of competitors,” concluded Agassi.
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