SAP’s xApps, a set of packaged composite applications which, the company
says, integrates and draws data from existing enterprise applications to
facilitate efficient business change and innovation, has been subject to a lot
of flak since its announcement in late 2002. Quiet has largely prevailed from
SAP’s side on its validity and uniqueness even in the face of competition
sounding the end of middleware. But Ranjan Das, VP, xApps Market Development for
SAP, who was in India recently, believes that the suite is still in its early
stages with progress being kept slow as a conscious decision and has no doubts
in its eventual bright future. Excerpts from an interview with Sathya Mithra
Ashok of Dataquest.
How is xApps different from the integration layer of applications that is
being developed by other ERP vendors?
XApps, is basically a set of snap on packaged, composite applications that sit
itself on all the different programs—legacy applications, ERP solutions and
custom applications—that an organization has obtained over time. But it has
certain crucial differences. While the rest of the solutions offered by other
ERP vendors just collates data from different points within the organization’s
IT deployments, xApps offers them the opportunity to build further on the data
that is obtained. We believe that xApps takes an organization to the level of
next practices which eventually will become the best practices of the future.
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Why has xApps implementation remained low scale?
The first product of the suite, xRPM was launched in December 2002. Since
then, we have had 100 implementations of xApps, around 80% of this being
existing SAP customers. This number of a little more than 100 was a conscious
decision. We wanted to build our base of references more than anything else. We
have close to 30 now and I want to build it up to 100 by the end of the year.
That would mean, hopefully, a total customer base of 500- by end of 2004.
How do you see xApps evolving in the future?
Right now, for the most part, xApps products are restricted to the internal
processes of an organization except for GTS. Eventually there will be more and
more products which go beyond the firewall and help in integrating with
customers and suppliers. Moreover, unlike many other initiatives of SAP, xApps
has a lot more partner involvement on the development side. We have close to a
dozen global partners, including Accenture and IBM, working on the products and
we will continue to expand on business processes and partners as the need
entails in the future.
How does India figure in future plans for xApps?
There are three fronts to India. First is as a market. Our intentions for
this year are to get as many references from India as possible. As a development
base, India has always been crucial to us, SAP Labs India comprises 10% of SAPs
global developer force, and that is no different in the case of xApps. The gut
of SAP’s first xApps product, xRPM was developed here. So is the next in-house
product. There is all reason to believe that future projects will also be worked
on here. There are currently 13 developers working on xApps at SAP Labs India.
This number is likely to go up to 50 developers this year.
In the larger picture, I see India playing a key role in the
worldwide implementation of xApps. This it will do by providing certain marquee
references along with partners with deep functional expertise in various
business processes aiding SAP in adding to the xApps repository.