The IndustrySpeak Program
The goal of the IndustrySpeak program is to help and enable companies to communicate with their business partners electronically in a seamless and straight-through process. The technical tool used to develop this interoperability capability is SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (XI). When you hear IndustrySpeak, think Industry knowledge and Industry data content. Asides from the knowledge of the XI tool and interoperability function, IndustrySpeak also has the knowledge of Industry communication standards and the functional facilitation of data exchange. This is the value that the IndustrySpeak program offers to our partners and customers.
Companies today need greater business flexibility to remain competitive, and interoperability based on industry standards is key to achieve the flexibility needed in the business to business (B2B) environment. IndustrySpeak offers and delivers industry standard processes as business packages to customers. Another objective of the program is to assist and support SAP partners (also known as Independent Solution Vendors or ISV) to build mappings and business packages on XI for Industry B2B transactions. The idea is to offer customers pre-build business packages build by SAP or a partner, so that the customers do not need to build them themselves.
In the effort of enabling the partners to build business packages for industries, the IndustrySpeak Partner Program was introduced in 2005. We have signed up more than 125 partner companies to develop business packages on XI. We have extended the Powered by SAP NetWeaver initiative to our partner community.
With that said, the focus of the IndustrySpeak program is on building new business packages and partner enablement. Our tasks are to understand the business focus (business scenario) and the industry standards focus of our partners, to coach and supervise partners towards certification process to provide a certified solution, and to start the process of go to market with partners. We do this by leading the innovation in building new Industry content business packages, providing workshops for partners to build adapter and XI content business packages, and making available the certification channel for SAP Interoperability Certification Based on Industry Standards (NW-XI-CNT-IS).
In the near future, we will publish a series of blogs in SDN with the focus on the best practices to build IndustrySpeak mappings and business packages on XI. You will also be able to ask technical and business questions and be involved in discussions about IndustrySpeak in the /community [original link is broken]
For more detail information about what is IndustrySpeak, the program's history and background, please see the weblog in SDN on What is IndustrySpeak?
For more detail information about XI Content certification based on industry standards, please see SAP Certified Integration --> Exchange Infrastructure --> NW-XI-CNT-IS.
