Over the next twelve months, you will see more tools and services from us

Dr Vishal Sikka is the CTO of SAP and has been a member of the executive
board leading the technology and innovation platform area since February 2010.
Sikkas responsibilities include the SAP technology platform and tools to design
and deliver the entire SAP technology portfolio, including SAP NetWeaver and SAP
BusinessObjects; developing new technologies and new investment opportunities,
including scientific, academic, and customer driven research; driving the
adoption of disruptive technologies and products, as well as developing advanced
products from research to early adoption; and ensuring coherence and consistency
in architecture and technology following Timeless Software principles. Sikka
also oversees key technology partnerships and customer co-innovation, and is an
executive sponsor of the SAP Labs network. In a freewheeling discussion with
Dataquest during SAPPHIRE 2010 in Frankfurt, Sikka touches upon some of the new
initiatives of SAP and the future roadmap. Excerpts

SAP has recently come up with the in-memory technology; in fact, it was
launched right here in SAPPHIRE. Is this in-memory technology pitted against
Oracles Exadata technology, especially in terms of talking to different
hardware and applications? With in-memory and the Sybase acquisition bringing in
mobile apps and device expertise, will SAP be in a better position to compete
against Oracle?

SAPs approach is very different from Oracles. Oracle has put all the layers of
their existing technology since the eighties into Exadata. Our approach is on
delivering true innovation and optimization at every layer, and to deliver these
innovations with our strategic partners. To do this, we work with an ecosystem
of the best to develop and deliver innovations in every aspect of our portfolio.

We believe that an in-memory appliancewith software from SAP and hardware
from partners such as HP, IBM, Intel, etcpresents a fairly unbelievable
reduction of cost through simplification of the layers. With the Sybase
acquisition, we extend the power of in-memory capabilities to the mobile
platform.

Will the Gateway project help SAP compete better against Oracle Fusion
Middleware?

Project Gateway is about enabling radically easier access and consumption of
SAP software from any device or environment (eg. Ruby, Python, mobile devices,
partner applications, etc). For example, on the partner front, Duet Enterprise,
a product jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP, is using project Gateway to
enable Microsoft SharePoint and office users to connect to SAP applications. It
also offers Microsoft SharePoint developers a way to create innovative solutions
through easier access to data and processes from SAP software without SAP
knowledge. This is in contrast to what we see Oracle doing with Fusion, which is
to use middleware as an attempt to cobble together various acquired
applications.

What are you foreseeing as the driving trends behind Project Gateway?

We are seeing people adopt new ways of using softwaredriven by the Internet
and consumer world with new devices (for example, offering location awareness),
and new user experiences (for example, in social workspaces), across
organizational and geographical boundaries.

The speed of innovation is outstanding, with new applications introduced
faster than ever seen before. There is a growing community of developers eager
to create end user applications which deliver instant value to people, in very
quick development cycles, and connect to any data sources.

IT is under pressure from users to bring these innovations to their
workplace. However, IT has real concerns about letting those client applications
connect to their systems; security, data integrity, cost of maintenance, and
support. However, this can be an opportunity rather than a challenge if IT can
drive innovation by providing access to enterprise systems while keeping control
over their core systems.

What are the three main dimensions or pillars of SAPs cloud strategy over
the next twelve months?

We see a natural evolution of software deployment models and expect that in
the future, companies will have a mix of on-premise and on-demand business
software running in a mix of public and private clouds. We are already seeing
this take shape in our customer base, where we have companies running SAP
on-premise solutions in public and private clouds. We also see customers running
SAPs on-demand solutions integrated seamlessly to SAP on-premise solutions in a
hybrid approach and so on.

Over the next twelve months, you will see more tools and services from SAP to
help customers deploy and manage their existing SAP systems on virtualized and
cloud infrastructures as well as exciting new offerings in and around SAPs SaaS
applications.

Vis--vis large enterprises, how would the balance between private and
public clouds be maintained?

At SAP, we always strive to give our customers choice. We, today, see
significant interest in both private and public cloud infrastructures, and we
support both. In Long term, we believe that hybrid infrastructures, consisting
of an internal cloud component and seamless access to external cloud capacity
when needed will be the norm.

How will SAP give collaborative application platform an enterprise focus
rather than the consumer focus of Facebook or Twitter?

Facebook and Twitter are aimed at sharing content, while SAPs approach for
enterprise users is around collaborative decision making and driving the
business. We are already delivering SAP StreamWork, an on-demand collaborative
decision making solution. Future SAP solutions will incorporate this
collaborative approach as well, while keeping a focus on the needs of enterprise
users.

How will StreamWork help SAP compete against Salesforce platforms like
Chatter?

There are a number of social/collaborative software products on the market
including Salesforce Chatter. These products are focused specifically on
collaboration unlike SAP StreamWork which helps teams to work together and
provides structure and proven methodologies to drive towards outcomes or
decisions. Outcomes and decisions are tracked along with every discussion,
document, method, or content and can be shared, used for learning, or reused
when similar questions arise.

Gartner and IDC have identified this new market called collaborative decision
making and SAP StreamWork is the first and only product available in this
market. Collaborative decision making brings together the people, information,
and business methodologies to drive successful decision making.

How are you building an ecosystem of application developers on StreamWork?

With its open architecture and with well documented APIs, SAP StreamWork
works with applications that customers already use like email, collaboration
software, document sharing, etc. Users can initiate team work activities from
email, bring in documents from Evernote, Box.net, or Scribd, or start a WebEx
session directly from SAP StreamWork. The first add ons to the platform have
already been created for these.

Rajneesh De

The author was hosted by SAP in Frankfurt

rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in