The Dozen 2004
SAP AG
Walldorf, Germany
What do you do if you're SAP, and your biggest competitors are embroiled in a nasty takeover battle? Hold their coats. Throughout much of 2003, while SAP was undergoing a transition of its own as cofounder Hasso Plattner passed the leadership baton to Henning Kagermann, Oracle and PeopleSoft dominated the news in enterprise applications. It's possible that its foes' distractions were just what SAP needed to allow the German firm to push further into the paradigm shift toward services-oriented, collaborative business systems, a shift SAP may now be leading.
With NetWeaver, SAP has put together an integration and application platform upon which to pivot its applications, Business Warehouse, Process Integration, and other increasingly "intelligent" components. In 2003, SAP also offered significant upgrades for its CRM and Supply Chain modules, and won customers with greater "best practices" depth in some key verticals. NetWeaver also embodies a shift to mySAP workflows linked to event-driven, business activity monitoring (BAM) functionality, which will be interesting to watch develop in 2004.
BusinessOne, SAP's offering for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), no doubt benefited from the distractions burdening its competitors. The days of "dumbed-down" applications are over; hard knocks have taught SAP to build best practices that reflect SMB requirements. With time-to-ROI tighter than ever, the collaborative, component-based approach SAP is pursuing will prove essential.
