SAP Launches Industry Value Networks to Bring Together Asia Pacific Partners, Customers and SAP Industry Solution Experts
Singapore — SAP Asia Pacific today announced that it has seen a triple-figure increase in SAP NetWeaver® revenue growth quarter-on-quarter between Q1 and Q2 2005. First introduced in January 2003, SAP’s application and integration platform is increasingly the choice for Asia Pacific enterprises looking to integrate their operations around open and agile technology developed around the business processes most important to their business. This growth follows the expansion of the SAP NetWeaver Asia Pacific developer and partner communities and availability of new resources supporting the platform in the region.
“SAP NetWeaver is the fulfilment of SAP’s promise of business integration to help our customers gain faster return on investment, foster growth, innovation and value,” said Simon Dale, Vice President of SAP NetWeaver Business Development, SAP Asia Pacific. “The continually growing adoption of SAP NetWeaver in the first half of the year is further evidence Asia Pacific businesses recognise our value proposition as the only applications provider offering a proven platform today centred around customer freedom—be it operating system, database or applications. Customers and analysts are continuing to confirm our ‘applistructure’ service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach is years ahead of competing vendors and focused on the area businesses care about most—business processes. With our Business Process Platform roadmap on track and more than half-way complete, we expect the rate of adoption will grow even more exponentially in the region.”
SAP NetWeaver: Customer Choice for Adaptability and Lower TCO
Over 35% of the growth in SAP’s NetWeaver revenue in the region was due to new SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI) and SAP Master Data Management (SAP MDM) customers. Airservices Australia, Comalco Aluminium, Telstra, Telecom New Zealand Ltd., Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd., and SCA Hygiene Australasia are a few of many organizations that have recently selected SAP XI in the region because it reduces the number of development platforms required by an organisation, supports open industry standards and covers the entire solution lifecycle, including design, middleware, deployment and change.
SCA Hygiene Australasia, a manufacturer of leading household hygiene brands operating across New Zealand, Australia and Fiji, has been benefiting from the seamless integration with non-SAP applications enabled by SAP XI, enabling full supply chain visibility. Gerard Guinane, IT director, SCA Hygiene Australasia, says: “At SCA, everything either starts or finishes with SAP. The success of our supply chain is dependent on all the systems and processes that integrate with our SAP solution. As we strive to improve our customer delivery performance any weak link can significantly disrupt the entire supply chain.”
“SAP NetWeaver offers customers the unique dual benefits of enhanced differentiation through business process innovation and increased productivity through technology consolidation and standardization,” added Dale. “Both combine to drive down the cost of doing business for our customers, while expanding their ability to adapt more quickly to changing market conditions.”
SAP NetWeaver Partner Power
To date, 855 ISV solutions have achieved Powered by SAP NetWeaver and Certified for SAP NetWeaver status. The upsurge in ISV interest marks a turning point in the market as SAP’s partner ecosystem reaches maturity and ISVs race to build and deploy solutions on SAP NetWeaver. The SAP NetWeaver platform gives ISVs an environment to create next-generation IT solutions using open standards-based services with ESA and the opportunity to leverage dedicated marketing and promotional benefits that SAP reserves for its partners. Along with Shai Agassi’s visit to the region in early July this year, SAP announced its first SAP NetWeaver Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the region, ComGroup, which has already released Asia Pacific’s first Powered by NetWeaver certified solution in China.
Announced today, the Industry Value Networks process brings together partners, customers and SAP industry solution experts to collaborate in addressing customer pain points through the development of enterprise services. SAP NetWeaver as a platform provides partners with the technical capabilities to build and deploy the most comprehensive enterprise solutions and the unique opportunity through ESA and the Industry Value Networks process to align with 28 industry concentrations that cater to more than 28,000 enterprise customers worldwide.
During Q2, SAP announced the availability of free certification to Powered by SAP NetWeaver (PBNW) for ISV’s who adopt the SAP NetWeaver platform and are certified before the end of November 2005. For the systems integrators, SAP launched the SAP NetWeaver SI program in Singapore, Malaysia, Korea and Taiwan with eight new partners joining the program during the quarter.
SAP announced in May 2005 that the technology market leaders Adobe, Cisco, Computer Associates, EMC, Intel, Macromedia, Mercury, Microsoft, Symantec and VERITAS are aligning around SAP’s ESA. These SAP partners plan to license ESA to provide “Enterprise Services-Ready” solutions that will deliver on the promise of Web services by providing enhanced flexibility, greater speed, lowered costs and diminished risk. The partners’ commitment provides clear evidence of significant market adoption of and momentum around SAP’s approach to next-generation customer architecture.
SAP also partners with other technology leaders such as Microsoft (Mendocino) and IBM (optimized DB2 for SAP), and open source Linux vendors such as Red Hat to deliver innovative solutions for joint customers that constantly seek to lower the TCO of application infrastructure.
Expanding Regional NetWeaver Resources
The Asia Pacific SAP NetWeaver business development team has expanded recently with a number of strategic hires. Derek Judge has joined from Business Objects to take on the role of Director of Business Analytics for SAP Asia Pacific. In his new role, Mr. Judge will focus on growing market share for SAP Analytics across the Asia Pacific region by leveraging opportunities in the enterprise, mid-market and SME sectors (see related release).
Coming from Oracle Asia Pacific, Atul Patel joins the NetWeaver Regional Business Development (BD) team as SAP MDM BD Manager for APA, based in Singapore. He will be responsible for showcasing SAP MDM’s ability to provide a single version of the truth for customer, product, employee, supplier, or user-defined data objects as part of SAP NetWeaver.
Reflecting the importance of Java to the NetWeaver platform, Taib Lokman has been added to the NetWeaver Regional BD team as SAP Asia Pacific’s resident Java Evangelist. He will be responsible for mobilizing the APA Java community in both the customer and Partner/ISV worlds around NetWeaver and the SAP Developer Network (SDN: http://www.sdn.sap.com).
Plans are also in the pipeline to increase SAP development employees from 2,000 to 4,000 professionals by the end of 2006. The plans are part of a €20 million expansion program that is being implemented in India which will result in the emergence of the India centre as a major hub for SAP NetWeaver development.
SAP further advanced its commitment to developers in India with the recent launch of its first SAP NetWeaver Center of Excellence (COE) located at the SAP Labs campus in Bangalore, India. Housed in SAP’s largest development facility outside of Germany, the COE will facilitate the process of educating SAP partners in India and Asia Pacific on the SAP NetWeaver platform to enable faster adoption of the Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA). The COE also provides support on a project basis to assist SAP partners in developing prototype and pilot solutions for unique customer requirements, and migrating legacy systems onto the SAP NetWeaver platform.
The Asia Pacific SAP Developer Network (SDN) Community grew by 33% quarter-on-quarter between Q1 and Q2 2005 and now, at more than 30,000, represents a quarter of the global SAP developer community. During the first half of 2005, SAP Asia Pacific completed the localisation of the SDN developer portal into Korean, Chinese and Japanese, which SAP Executive Board Member Shai Agassi launched at major events in Korea, China and Japan respectively.
Successful SAP NetWeaver Technology Tour Developer Days
Reaching over 4,500 developers, SAP NetWeaver Technology Days in Bangalore, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo Singapore, Korea and Australia have also been adding to the buzz surrounding NetWeaver in the region. Across ten stops in Asia Pacific, the SAP NetWeaver Technology Tour provided advanced sessions on cutting edge topics like NetWeaver Developer Studio, Visual Composer, Exchange Infrastructure and more—all led by experts from SAP and technology partners. This tour was supported by Sun and Intel with whom SAP is working to strengthen the Java development community in the enterprise market.
