Open Door Policy

Major vendors preach open integration gospel

Gestating in the care of startups such as iSpheres and relatively small business units such as Fujitsu Software's iFlow team until recently, the type of software that iSpheres calls "meta-apps" is now touted by the world's largest ERP vendors.

In June 2002, SAP announced its new Cross Applications (xApps) architecture. (At press time, SAP's Resource and Program Management xApp was scheduled for a December 2002 release.) The new SAP architecture is designed to pull underlying enterprise applications and users into a collaborative, analytic, portal-based environment that coordinates all components and actions through defined business processes. In 2002, Siebel Systems Inc. and PeopleSoft Inc. announced their own integration architectures, Universal Application Network and AppsConnect, respectively.

As industry analyst and Intelligent Enterprise contributing editor Joshua Greenbaum puts it, xApps "do the classic enterprise software thing of automating," but what they're automating is the interaction among already automated pieces of the enterprise. They also reduce the need for custom integration efforts.

XApps leverage mySAP Technology and come bundled with a portal, Business Information Warehouse, Content and Knowledge Management, Exchange Infrastructure for connectivity, and a Java and ABAP application server. They include a workflow engine and tools for modeling, configuration, and management.

SAP currently expects to create several more xApps this year and expects many other vendors to create applications to be certified as SAP xApps. Because these are "packaged composite applications," says Dennis Moore, senior vice president of the xApps global business unit at SAP, "the components used in one xApp would generally be useful for other xApps." This nature of xApps is expected to allow a kind of snowball effect: The more xApps already written, the more quickly additional xApps can be created; and incremental deployments of xApps in an enterprise should yield exponential increases of value.

Moore explains that xApps aren't "just" business process management: "XApps implement a process that is called Continuous Business Innovation that integrates strategy, planning, execution, and monitoring in a tight, closed loop." "Monitoring" refers to exception and event monitoring.

David Dawson, vice president of marketing for iSpheres, states that iSpheres isn't threatened but rather encouraged by the entry of xApps to the market. He says iSpheres' "sense and respond" platform could work well in conjunction with xApps, adding a level of monitoring that he believes xApps don't provide.

Greenbaum says the true test of any individual xApp is whether it truly reduces implementation time and cost as SAP promises. "If they don't reduce total cost of ownership relative to custom development," he says, "they will have failed miserably." But Greenbaum believes SAP is following the evolution of the market: "XApps aren't a revolution in the design of software," he says, "however, they do represent the future of software development and application delivery."

— Jeanette Burriesci

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