SAP high-flyer gives view from the top
Published: 01 Oct 2003 14:25 BST
Do you think an Oracle merger with PeopleSoft would be anticompetitive?
I don't think it's necessarily in the best interest of PeopleSoft customers. For that matter, in most cases, I don't believe that any acquisition is done in the best interest of customers. One could argue that J.D. Edwards customers are not best served by the integration with PeopleSoft. Is it anticompetitive? I don't think they're doing it because they're trying to block competition. I think they're trying to do it because they're trying to compete with us and then it's hard to say if it's anticompetitive. But I think that question is reserved for the US Department of Justice and their evaluation of the case.
What kind of technology is SAP cooking up that's really going to wow people in the next five years?
There isn't one silver bullet. I think NetWeaver is our next foundation -- just like three-tier client server was our foundation 10 years ago. NetWeaver is our foundation for the next 10 years. You'll see a lot of players imitating us over these next 10 years, but I still believe that we will drive this.
What is NetWeaver, and how is it different from what came before it?
One of the things we're doing this time is we're bringing in our technology platform, which is sort of our secret sauce for how the applications are so robust and scalable. But we're opening up the platform so that people can build with it, including other players in the industry, such as integrators or developers. And we don't care if they're our partners or competitors -- they can use our platform and build on it.
SAP launched its NetWeaver initiative in January to make development and setup of business applications easier. Coming up on a year later, what does SAP have to show for it?
What we've shown for it is a lot of customers and what they've done with NetWeaver throughout the year. We've had case studies from Nokia and from Siemens, from Lufthansa. And we had small companies like Check Point. They've just completely changed the way they talk to their customers and distributors.
What is it adding to SAP's bottom line?
The benefit for us is that the customer is deploying SAP in a much more strategic way than it did before.
How so?
Think back five years ago. Customers viewed us as the ERP (enterprise resource planning) company, with all the other players around us telling everybody how we're going to die. And Siebel will win the battle, and i2 Technologies will win the battle, and PeopleSoft will win the battle, because we were the back-end business processes that were not interesting, and they would wind up doing the front-end, interesting processes. Well, five years have passed, and we're actually doing all the processes. And all the guys who predicted that we'd be dead are niche players right now.
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