yourSAP.com

In January this

year, I had the pleasure of experiencing the release of Lotus Notes





version 5 at Lotusphere held at Orlando. The excitement and exhilaration
across the Disney quaysides, amongst the 10,000 mostly American

attendees in half pants, was about the greatly enhanced levels of

collaboration and workflow across a Lotus community. But with a

change. Lotus had replaced the front-end to a browser look-and-feel

that allowed a personalized workplace to be built up easily and

intuitively.

And then in

June this year we had the release of Office 2000. Again, a leapfrog

development in terms of levels of file exchange and file interchange

for desktop productivity. Making it easy for you and I to use Excel,

Word, PPT and HTML file formats seamlessly across a TCP/IP or internet

backbone without wondering too much about conversions and so on.

If this has not taken the wind out of us its because most multinationals

and Indian corporates are still catching their breath after transitioning

from Office 95 to Office 97.

But now there

was food for thought. In the months after Office 2000 and during

the mind numbing toils of DQ Top 20 in July and August, I struggled

to sharpen the focus on what was going on behind the scenes in the

workshops of software majors. I speculated with Microsoft employees

on Windows 2000. That it would unleash a framework of collaboration

across the web, putting client server applications and computing

forever to rest. And they smiled and said maybe, maybe, maybe.

And then there

was the pleasure of mySAP.com. First previewed to the Indian press

in October and officially launched across Asia at SAPphire in November-the

cat was now out of the bag, the wind gusting and sails unfurled.

I remember how I almost got off my seat at the preview, surprised

and demanding to know how these three products were so similar in

functionality and originality. And SAP had nodded-Yes, there is

a collaboration with Microsoft. And at SAPphire, Peter Zencke, architect

of mySAP.com, remarked at this question from me, "They are

all the same".

The writing

is on the wall and after mySAP.com it could never have been clearer.

The workplace as SAP describes it is going to the browser, set up

the way you want it. Whether it is home, business or enterprise

applications, the browser is very soon going to be a confiding soulmate

on your desktop. Collaboration between competitors, suppliers, partners,

customers is very soon going to be as instinctive as browsing on

the web and file access and exchange as seamless as email. As SAP

describes it, the real business environment will transform to the

virtual marketplace.

Your business

transition to this virtual market place will be as hitch-free as

your ability to migrate to web based applications. As trouble-free

as your ability to accept the ecom portal as the marketplace of

tomorrow. And vendors are making it easy for you. MySAP.com is a

powerful development linking back-end automation based on the R/3

engine to your every day browser.

What is the

message for the Indian enterprise community? Yes, we know the web

is still not the best of places in the country. But the disadvantage

of shying away from web-based collaboration and web-based applications

is likely to be more serious than waiting and waiting for bandwidth

and connectivity to improve. On the web, the first mover advantage

and built up learning experience is the 'killer'. There is still

no substitute for that.

Arun

Shankar