NetWeaver 7.30 is a synchronised release for the following SAP Products that currently run on various version of the SAP Java Application Server :-
SAP Composition Environment – CE
SAP Process Integration – PI (Java only version)
SAP Portal – Enterprise Portal
SAP BI Java
Today this was announced at SAP TechEd – Berlin…so what does this announcement mean for customers ?
SAP talked about Evolution and New Horizons – my chosen words are Simplification and Innovation.
Simplification
Simplification because now you can take a whole bunch of SAP products that greedily wanted their own server and put them together. This means that for the first time in about 5 years you can start talking about less hardware for NetWeaver and not more ! (just in time for you to re-use all that tin for your Business Objects 4.0 and Sybase Unwired Platform…but that is another story). A typical landscape might look like the picture below.
Innovation
Innovation in that you can do more with one 7.30 box than you could before. You can take all the tools from each separate product and blend your solution across them, so if your Visual Composer applications (typical CE) needs personalisation (typically portal) and a brokered Web Service (typically PI) – all this can be done in one place.
It also means that hard pressed BASIS teams can focus training on 2 application servers (or 4 if you include BO and Sybase!) – which should smooth the delivery of applications – so more value quicker ?
I think you might be oversimplifying things a little bit here: the fact that’s technically possible to execute these products on one box doesn’t mean it is sensible to do so: what if after this sync point the products will go their own way again? What about existing customer landscapes? It’s not that easy to migrate your dual-stack PI 7.1(1)-system to the Java-only variant on NW7.3. Etc.
I think customers would be wise not to act too quickly. By which I don’t mean they shouldn’t deploy BO 4.0 and SUP of course :).
Just my 2 cents,
Cheers, Fred
I also know that quite alot of companies currently use only one of these technologies because adopting another was seen as a “big deal”.
I think these companies will more easily explore these other tools.
I did say simplification not simple 🙂
How customers and consultants adapt to this will be interesting to see.
I think we need to start thinking about PI/CE and Portal as a set of capabilities that (can) run on the same platform.
Hopefully with this approach solutions will merge across the capability, which will result in more robust solutions.
Consumption is the key success factor. The Gateway project is promising in that sense. Gateway demo is impressing 🙂