At its European user event in Paris, SAP strengthened its service-oriented architecture (SOA) portfolio, unveiling an appliance that lets firms tap into hundreds of pre-loaded SOA applications.

The appliance is designed to offer firms an environment to manage their SOA deployments while also allowing them to add new features. Shai Agassi, president of SAP’s Product and Technology Group, said it will contain hundreds of composite applications that are ready for customers to run alongside their enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations.

The enterprise applications giant also plans to launch a central SAP xApp hub, which it said will be linked to the SOA appliance and will help firms assess and deploy the SOA applications developed by SAP, its partners and customers. SAP expects to release the xApp hub later this year.

Agassi said that the appliance and hub were developed in response to customers requesting an “SOA backbone”. “It allows customers to take the composite apps, test them on the side, decide on deployment and then deploy them without needing to touch and retest their main system,” he said. “[With the hub] we are connecting our customers to the great ecosystem we’ve built over the past two or three years.” This “ecosystem” already covers 26 industries and more than 400 NetWeaver-based applications.

SAP also announced plans to set up regional solution centres, where it will work with its partners to develop solutions that are easy to deploy and tailored to certain industries. SAP aims to deliver around 80 industry-specific solutions this year.

SAP’s chief executive, Henning Kagermann, said that as well as developing industry solutions-specific systems, the firm plans to invest further in hosted systems to add to its existing on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) range. “I think we’ll continue to bring more on-demand solutions to the market, and naturally the next step is services on-demand,” he added.