SAP furthers cloud strategy with NetWeaver

Strategy is enabled by its Service Orientated Architecture

SAP is further committed to the cloud

SAP’srelease of NetWeaver 7.3, announced at the company’s TechEd event, demonstrates SAP’s increasing commitment to the cloud.

The new release offers customers the ability to manage cloud operations and provides shared tools for building applications on-premise, on-demand or on mobile devices.

The company has already said it plans to build more on-demand applications for customers. Currently, its Business ByDesign software, based on NetWeaver technology, uses a cloud model to provide SMEs with business management tools.

Thomas Otter, Gartner’s lead analyst on SAP, said: “Business ByDesign will be the primary method by which SAP will build new applications, and it will also be the place where partners and ISVs will extend SAP’s Business ByDesign offerings.

SAP is quietly confident that it has the architecture right this time; it feels it has the underlying technology right to support it and the margins and operating costs under control to scale it.”

The other part of SAP’s cloud strategy is based on River, the company’s codename for an environment in which to develop cloud-based applications for larger companies.

Its first River application, Carbon Impact, is already available on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, and other line-of-business applications, such as such as Sales On-Demand, are expected to follow. “SAP foresees customers and partners using River to build lightweight applications that extend the business suite,” said Otter.

Adrian Simpson, SAP’s head of BI and platform, said that he expected customers increasingly to use a mix of on-premise and cloud-based applications. While SAP was traditionally associated with large on-premise implementations, he said, this was changing.

“A few years ago we re-architected our application platform to be a services-oriented architecture, and put in place the foundations that made it a lot easier for us. You may think of SAP as a big monolithic application, but it’s fully service-enabled.”

Although SAP has been a slow starter in the cloud market, it is catching up rapidly, said Otter: “SAP has lagged behind the best-of-breed vendors in specific niches and it has been slow to articulate a cloud strategy, and it has been doing a lot in the background to figure this out itself. I think it has learned a lot in terms of running Business ByDesign over the last couple of years.”

The transition to cloud was a challenging one for SAP, he added: “SAP is having to do a balancing act of keeping the existing environment growing and innovating, and delivering functionality in the existing environment while preparing for a different world.”

Simpson said that SAP would be making announcements in the next few months about the certification of partners in the provision of cloud services.