Not Your Father's SAP NetWeaver - Perspectives from #SAPTechEd 2011

The highlight of the event were the two keynotes given by Jim Snabe and Vishal Sikka.  Both of them were at the top of their inspiration, giving great metaphors and proof-points on SAP’s 3-pronged strategy of innovation on top of our Core in various industries from Healthcare to Consumer Goods (and all done in the middle of major EU crisis).  Simple and catchy message of E=mc(imc²) did certainly stick with customers, where the Enterprise value is to be measured by the cross pollination of investments in Mobility x Cloud x In-Memory Computing.  Backed by two hip customer showcases of Skullcandy with presenter rolling on stage on a skateboard, and Red Bull with presenters dressed as Formula 1 crew – left lot of folks with impression that “this is not your father’s SAP” of the past.

Now where does SAP NetWeaver fit into this picture?  Let’s start with Björn Goerke’s rundown of the NW highlights: 

• Portal as the UI hub is 10,000+ installations strong, and seen by Gartner as “Leader” in the Magic Quadrant
• jPaaS BETA announced as Project “River” – showcasing Cloud adoption across our platform
• NetWeaver 7.3 gets HANA support for the 16,000+ BW systems – showcased by Red Bull

The UI Strategy and HTML5@SAP were one of the well attended pods & sessions.  Good summary in a post by an SAP mentor DJ Adams:

I learned that the library is built upon jQuery. So SAP are avoiding the NIH syndrome, that’s good. But there were other attendees that were questioning SAP’s decision to build Yet Another Javascript Ui Library. At the very least, the model implementation of the library’s MVC framework gives the wily Javascript hacker a head-start on using and consuming Gateway services. And in my opinion that’s the deal. Yes, we have a very nice UI library (and no, it’s not available until 2Q12, before you ask!) but we also have code that speaks the language of thousands of front-end developers on the one hand, and eases the connection to the proprietary back-end on the other.

Moving onto insights from various session on SAP NetWeaver Business Client, Page Builder, Side Panel, there's been lot of customer demand to make these user productivity capabilities available in lower releases.

Portal got also lot of attention this TechEd and one can feel the “renaissance” of topics and initiatives presented from Portal Mobile, Portal On Demand all the way to Portal 7.3 On Premise and Enterprise Workspaces.  One interesting spotlight was on the Portal On Demand as a new product coming in the first half of 2012.

Customer session on the first reported experiences of using SAP NetWeaver Gateway and OData enablement at Adidas for an iPad mobile solution on top of SAP CRM showed:

• Easy to set up, steep learning curve.  Feed-based protocol easy to understand and to debug
• Extensibility of standard services limited.  Custom developed services (OData Channel) required for customer-specific data retrieval and high performance
• Ramp Up means lots of new functionality and bug fixes through service packs (positive and negative). However, gives opportunity for being one step ahead.

All in all, SAP NetWeaver is back on track as a platform that has definitely improved its perception in the market since it’s revival at the last year’s TechEd and further confirming it this year.  Through cross-pollination inside the NetWeaver capabilities (e.g. Gateway, Portal, NW UI) and with the SAP’s 3-pronged strategy for Cloud, Mobile and In-memory, SAP NetWeaver can break new records in 2012.

More in-depth coverage of the technology event hightlights brought by Matthias Steiner:

• SAP HANA - Technology Innovation at SAPPHIRE NOW
• Announcing: Project “River” / jPaaS BETA