AMR: SAP Moves Down the SOA Path

If you have a minute and are curious about the SOA direction of our favorite German ERP giant -- after all, there's only one -- check out Jim Shepard's write-up on SAP's analyst day over on AMR's site (free for now -- no registration required). Jim goes into detail on where SAP is regarding its upcoming SOA product releases (for both the enterprise and the middle market). According to Jim, "There are certainly promising indications in both the latest version of mySAP and the new midmarket product that Enterprise SOA may pay off. SAP is starting to spend more time talking about the new capabilities and less time describing the technology, and that’s a very good sign."

I'm personally looking forward to digging into SAP's SRM direction in the coming weeks, and discussing how this will be impacted by the latest SOA progress and developments. It's been rumored for sometime that SAP is rewriting Frictionless on the NetWeaver stack, and I've heard from multiple sources that this is the case. But whether SAP SRM turns out to be a showcase application for NetWeaver -- as it was originally intended -- or merely an application that leverages an SOA approach to provider greater flexibility and integration at SAP shops remains to be seen. On a different but related note, does anyone else find it curious how quiet Oracle has been of late in the Spend Management world?

- Jason Busch