In the keynote of SAP TechEd 2010, Vishal Sikka, CTO at SAP, asked Bjoern Goerke to say a few words about SAP NetWeaver, the actual status and the current developments. We at Sweetlets found that this is important to our clients in the market that we have decided to transcribe the interview which Bjoern gave on the second day of SAP TechEd in Berlin to follow up on the keynote.
The video interview can also be found at Virtual SAP TechEd and is property of SAP. Below here is just a transcription of the original.
Interview with Bjoern Goerke, Senior Vice President, Technology and Platform Core, SAP AG, Oct 12, 2010, SAP TechEd 2010 – Berlin
Interviewer: Hello. Welcome to TechEd live TV. We are here at the show floor at TechEd Berlin, it is Day 2, I am sitting here with Bjoern Goerke. Bjoern, thanks so much for joining us today.
Bjoern: It’s a pleasure being here!
Interviewer: I noticed that a third through Vishal’s keynote, he brought you on stage to talk about NetWeaver at more detail and I am going to ask you the same to talk about NetWeaver in detail. But before we do that, maybe you can give us a short introduction? Tell us about your role at SAP and what you and your team are responsible for.
Bjoern: Yes. I am within the technology innovation platform development. I am responsible for what could be probably best described as the NetWeaver foundation. If you refer to the picture that Vishal presented during the keynote, Vishal said this is the guy who is probably closest to the operating system. That’s what we are doing. It is the application servers, ABAP and Java, the development environment around it, the security components, UI technology – all the pieces that make our application infrastructure basically. So, we are within technology development probably the most techie as it gets within SAP development. That’s us. That’s why I took off the tie again to blend better with the techie crowd out here. That’s what I am doing and as part of this role, I am responsible for making sure within R&D that we have NetWeaver 7.30 delivered this year.
Interviewer: Perfect, great. So, Vishal made NetWeaver 7.3 one of the cornerstones of his keynote yesterday. And of course with the subject of a big announcement we had yesterday, we announced the release of 7.3. Can you tell us more about the enhancements? What is it the customers are going to see with the release of SAP NetWeaver 7.3?
Bjoern: Sure, Netweaver 7.30, as I said yesterday already [in keynote at SAP TechEd 2010 Berlin, Ed.], is the next kind of complete NetWeaver release that we are shipping. We are very proud about that and are very happy that it is making it out to the customers finally. It is a complete release, so we have all the NetWeaver usage types as we call them -the NetWeaver hubs within that release and a consistent release level. Which means there is a NetWeaver Portal, there is a BW in there, the business warehouse, there’s process infrastructure PI, the Composition Environment. All the NetWeaver hubs have been basically put now on one release level. They have been bundled again in one release in a coherent and integrated manner and with a number of improvements on a features and capabilities side. And that is basically what we are shipping now with SAP NetWeaver 7.30.
Also from the feedback I got here, what needs to be understood is that we are really following this idea of innovation without disruption with how we are delivering this thing which basically means that the business suite with its stable core strategy will remain on a NetWeaver 7.0 applications infrastructure. So, the idea here is we bring very dedicated, carefully selected innovations to the core of the business suite without disrupting them in any way. Upgrades must be very smooth, no retesting, basically getting very smooth innovations into the business suites. But that is keeping their core stable. Don’t touch mission critical working processes, but have innovations being brought to those customers in a very dedicated and careful manner.
Around this whole business suite, things look very different. Customers are rather asking about speed and innovation, bringing new functionality, extending out of the business suite core into other areas like extending to non SAP solutions or having a portal with new collaboration features. So, the focus there is more on speed, getting things out, not at a more stable rate, but getting things in a faster pace. And that is what we have been doing with NetWeaver over the past two years as well.
So, we have shipped for example Composition Environment, two versions. We have shipped process integration. That is the kind of innovation that we have had being shipped independently from a large NetWeaver release. Now, what that leads to after a while is obviously some proliferation or versions that are out at customers who ask questions about how do these different versions relate to each other, are there dependencies. We sometimes have to install these versions obviously in separate systems because there is a mismatch of versions in-between. That creates demand for a consolidated release. And that is what we are doing now with NetWeaver 7.3.
So, we are putting all the pieces together again on one release level. And for example, one of the nice advantages is that for example with all our Java components. They are now running again on a single JEE5 Java server version which was brought out with Java CE before but now all the pieces can run on the same application server. Which means that you can for example deploy an Enterprise Portal and CE functionality on the same server. So that is reducing TCO, that is making it easier to manage that kind of system and you get all the great features that we have done for this JEE server like largely improved performance, much better stability, memory behaviors, scale out, great support ability features, all these kind of features and capabilities you now get across all the hubs. And that’s what this release is about. And that is the capabilities side and obviously there are tons of features in there.
So, we had a lot of improvements in the various hubs as well. On the dimensional extensibility on the one hand side and user interaction in the other side. So, if you look at for example process integration what we have provided now is a much tighter integration into solution manager where it is now possible to look at system landscapes with PI systems to have central monitoring around this. We have a Java only small footprint, high throughput version runs on Java only, our ESB version of PI. On the BPM side, the Business Process Management side, we have for example now the possibility to embed suite applications coming with business suite 2010 into BPM workflows. So you have the link between modeled work flows and processes and the underlying applications in the business suite. So there are tons of features at that end. I think the biggest advancement we have actually done on the portal side, SAP NetWeaver Portal.
There we have not had any intermediate release of functionalities since our 7.0 portal came out, so it is a big step here. I think a lot of the things that were kind of feedback from customers on our existing portal have been put into this release. It is a huge improvement on the portal side which I like a lot. A lot about end user empowerments, new page building capabilities with AJAX technology. There is an out of the box wiki and forum functionality coming with the Enterprise Portal.
We’ve worked a lot on making it possible to embed our portal into other vendor’s portals. So you can embed SAP Portal content, roles, iViews, pages, embed it into Microsoft SharePoint for example or IBM WebSphere Portal which is also a use case we also see on the customer side. That is the kind of things that have been happening in here. That is just exciting to see all the pieces now come together and we are having this one shipment at the end of this year.
Interviewer: Well, I was going to ask you there has been a lot of criticism lately. There has been the impression that SAP has been very quiet about NetWeaver in recent years. And it is true we have not made a lot of noise and I think there has been sometimes the impression that this meant that there was not a lot happening. I think you just actually dispelled that immediately because the volume of information you just shared, all these details. So I mean, if you, what would you say to critics, beyond what you just told us on all this great details about the enhancements? What would you say to critics? Or just customers who are wondering why was SAP so quiet about NetWeaver? It is great that we have this big bang now here at TechEd but what would you say to people about why so quiet in the past?
Bjoern: I think first of all I guess I have to agree that there was a certain dip in let’s say noise about NetWeaver in the last two years. I think that was a lot due to the fact that there was a lot of focus about business objects and now by design this year, which makes perfect sense to get the focus. There was a lot of demand, a lot of explanations that needed to happen in that area. I just find that we are somehow got out.
But if you just look behind the scenes and what was happening, I think there were a lot of things happening in NetWeaver. As I said already, I think we had intermediate enhancement package shipments on the NetWeaver 7.0 side that went into business suite stable core, increments that were delivered. We had a lot of things going on for our by design solution that is driven by NetWeaver underlying technology as well. There are a lot of efforts went in there in optimizing the landscape for an on demand usage of NetWeaver. And a lot of the findings that we had there and the improvements we extracted out of this exercise went back into the broader scope of NetWeaver 7.3. So we put a lot of learning’s in there where you learn from operating the system landscape on your own, putting that into our classical product. So that was a very good exercise.
Then we obviously had as I mentioned already the individual hubs that were shipped on mentioned Composition Environment, BPM and PI that went out. So it was a continuous flow of innovation getting out to the customers. And I think the biggest thing that was happening on our development side over the past years was really getting business objects portfolio and classical SAP NetWeaver portfolio tightly integrated. And that was happening to a large extent, what you can see now for example Excelsius running on top of our NetWeaver BW. Or you see that within suite you can have Excelsius and Crystal Reports running within our transaction environment and extending the reporting and analysis capabilities of very classical SAP applications.
So, I think there was a broad range of things happening which I would think should dispel this kind of rumors about NetWeaver and there is nothing happening. And the most important thing is now to me really is the various activities that we had with business suite 2010, business suite 7, Innovations 2010 coming out now, with Business Objects release 4 coming out and NetWeaver 7.3 that we have integrated these things and somehow brought them all together and all of a sudden my feeling is the sum of the pieces is, the sum of the total is much more than just the individual pieces. And that is a good story. This is what is exactly happening now with NetWeaver 7.3 coming out at this point in time.
Interviewer: And this, I mean we could not pick a better venue than SAP TechEd to really kick start the SAP NetWeaver discussion story once again. And since Vishal was speaking about it during his keynote yesterday and you know, you have been here, it is almost the end of day two. You have given sessions and presentations. You have attended; you have probably spoken with mentors and bloggers, and various people. So what is some of the feedback you have heard so far from customers and attendees at TechEd. What are they saying about NetWeaver that you have picked up so far?
Bjoern: I had the opportunity to talk to the SAP mentors. I had customer interaction. We talked to analysts, press. I have walked around, collected feedback, looked at sessions what’s happening. The overall feedback was extremely positive from what we announced, especially for NetWeaver 7.3. It is something we knew for quite a while. The customers were asking already, “When is the functionality coming out?”, “When do we get this?” So, it wasn’t a complete surprise that they are now somehow grasping the message and are very positive about it. People told me they loved the very concrete messages that they received. It was down to earth. It is not in the far, far future. We are talking about very concrete products coming out now. It’s something they can put at work within their company very, very soon. I think that was appreciated a lot. And that makes a lot of sense. I think it also helped to make clear that we are not just looking at NetWeaver in the classical sense. The world has developed; Vishal put that out on the keynote very frankly. The world has changed since 2002 when we originally introduced NetWeaver and so it’s clear that also NetWeaver had to change. We are looking at new areas where technology gets applied. It is the mobility topic. The cloud topic is very important to us. On demand solutions, software as a service, and in memory, obviously NetWeaver has to evolve with that kind of developments and that is the role of NetWeaver. It is THE SAP technology…
Interviewer: And people are definitely picking up on this.
Bjoern: People are picking up on this story.
Interviewer: They have been hearing about it here at SAP TechEd. They have been hearing it; they have received the message and what more could we really ask for actually? This is great. Bjoern, thanks so much. Thanks everybody for tuning in to TechEd live here in Berlin with Bjoern Goerke.
HTML5 Navigation
Click Stream
BW Tree
Events Calendar
Pretty Poll
Quick Links
SSO Express
System Messenger
World Times