<<ZDNet blogging colleague Dan Farber recently spoke with Shai Agassi,
president of SAP's product and technology group, about SAP's emerging
SOA strategy, who promised that SAP would be leading the enterprise
SOA market by the end of 2007.
SAP's intentions are ambitious Agassi plans to move 10,000 customers
running on SAP's SOA-enabling NetWeaver middleware platform within the
year. Agassi told Dan that by that time SAP expects to have reached a
tipping point, in its favor, for its services-enabled ERP platform and
ecosystem, through its base of mySAP ERP 2005 customers, Web services
and xApps.
Can they do it, logistically? I think they can. But the $64 million
(or make that billion) question is, should SAP competitors be running
scared, or is SAP running scared?
First, the logistics. Jeff Nolan, a former SAPper himself, noted in
his own analysis that there are 400 customers on SAP's SOA platform
today, and "considering that the existing customer base is not beating
down the doors to get the upgrade, I just don't see how you could
possibly sell and install 1/3 of the entire customer base in a year."
But Nolan adds that's he's reserving judgement, and will wait and see
what happens a year from now.
But I don't doubt SAP can move this mountain if it wants to. For a
large vendor with lots of resources, it's no biggie. I've seen IBM
move far more than 10,000 customers on various platforms countless
times to new technologies with barely a hiccup. For example, back in
the late 1990s, I watched Big Blue move a good chunk of its iSeries
base from 32-bit to 64-bit computing without a whimper and almost no
fanfare while the rest of the world struggles to catch up with
64-bit computing to this day. So if a vendor with a locked-in customer
base can offer a compelling upgrade to a SOA-enabled stack without
breaking any current implementations, then go forth and multiply.
SAP's customers rely heavily on the vendor for mission-critical
applications. Any attempt switch away from the big vendor is a
non-trivial task. But the long-term question for SAP and other large
application vendors goes to the very nature of SOA: applications are
gradually being broken down into what are essentially hot-swappable
application components. What happens when customers get a taste of the
"freedom" from the single-vendor locked-in, complex applications they
had learned to live with for so long?
Companies are already finding it more cost-effective to move certain
pieces of applications to a standardized middleware stack than go
through major back-end upgrades. SAP knows this, and Oracle knows
this. As I have observed in previous posts to this blog (here and
here, for example), I am aware of companies that have taken the SOA
middleware route as an end-run around complex back-end ERP systems.
AMR's Bruce Richardson even went so far to say that SOA will kill off
ERP at least as we know it in its large form factor within the
next ten years.
Jeff Nolan observes that large vendors such as SAP is that they are
built on a "culture of complexity" the antithesis of what SOA is
supposed to be all about:
"
big enterprise software vendors have increasingly been unable to
'do anything simple.' It's not that there are teams of seasoned
developers sitting around suggesting ways to make things more complex,
but there is a pervasive culture in these companies that values
complexity over simplicity as proxy for 'value creation.' The belief
is that a complex technology stack represents a competitive barrier
and the ability to lock in customers, and quite honestly it has worked
as a strategy.
Nolan adds that the foundation of SOA "a standardization of
application protocols and the holy grail of software, interoperability
without penalty" is a trend that has legs. "This stuff really does
work and will get better with age, and it either promises or
threatens, depending on your vantage point, to reshape the industry as
we know it."
Jeff Nolan also sees the shift away from complex, locked-in back-end
systems to a more flexible middleware service layers:
"The irony in our current market is that the big SOA platforms end
up driving not a technology shift that fuels a new wave of growth, but
a business model shift as a result of the decoupling of a tightly
integrated suite of applications into a loosely coupled repository of
services. Customers will be able to substitute services and drive
their own solutions offerings 'at the edge' in a way that is
reminiscent of best of breed."
SAP, as does Oracle, knows that to remain a player, it needs to
embrace SOA, and to any extent possible, have customers doing SOA
their way. But this brings into conflict the idea of Big SOA versus
Incremental SOA. As I've said in a previous post, Oracle is about Big
SOA, and the same goes for SAP Big SOA. "Sure, go ahead, take your
huge back-end system, and move some of that functionality out to a
service layer preferably ours." An incremental SOA approach, of
course, would see a lessening of the influence of large vendors.>>
You can read Joe's blog at:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=773
Gervas
