SAP’s Shai Agassi Provides Vision

SAP’s Shai Agassi Provides Vision for the Next Evolution of Enterprise Software – the Web Services Wave

Industry Thought Leader Delivers Vision for Marketplace in 2015 and Makes Call to Action for Partners to Collaborate to Drive Economic Growth

HANOVER, Germany - March 08, 2006 - During a featured keynote at the International CeBIT Summit, Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and executive board member, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), discussed how industry trends are driving the next wave of product innovation during the coming decade. Agassi detailed how IT can play an increasingly strategic role for every business around the world and in turn drive exponential growth in the global economy. During the summit, Agassi joined an elite delegation of speakers from trade, industry and politics, including Colin MacLean Boyd, CIO, Sony Ericsson; Dr. Thomas Endres, CIO, Deutsche Lufthansa; and Yang Yuanqing, chairman of the board, Lenovo Group, who presented their thoughts about global IT trends and issues. The announcement was made on the opening day of the CeBIT 2006 trade fair, being held in Hanover, Germany, March 9-15.

“The power behind a highly collaborative, open ecosystem of partners who together build the common business language that allow customers large and small to drive innovation throughout their organization will also fuel economic milestones for decades to come,” said Agassi during his keynote address to 500 attendees gathered at the event. “We are already seeing that this can happen when collective innovation is realized within the ecosystem, with more than 1,000 ISVs committing to building solutions on the SAP NetWeaver platform. It is just a taste of what’s to come for our joint customers who are yearning for software companies to join together under a common platform to enable business process innovation.”

Agassi described the three enterprise software waves that the industry passed through during the 1980s, 1990s and the early part of this decade. The first enterprise software wave was the mainframe wave in the 1980s, where companies started utilizing and processing stored information to more effectively run their businesses as well as service their customers. The client/server wave disrupted the mainframe generation by allowing customers to better leverage software as a strategic enabler of globalization. Next came the Internet wave in the 1990s. This third wave helped to drive transparency of information inside corporations and across the value chain, providing efficiencies in companies’ sales, supply chain and research and development.

During this time, companies were investing heavily in technology, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other applications, in order to gain these greater efficiencies. The pace of innovation at this time was unprecedented and companies were using software to more effectively manage growth in an efficient way. The big payoff from the 1990’s was that investments in ERP systems allowed back-office and front-office applications to be seamlessly connected, allowing for user productivity. Agassi described how SAP has helped companies for the past three decades grow their business and manage these three waves.

Agassi said that SAP is well-positioned to continue to be a trusted partner during the newest wave—the Web services wave. “Increased flexibility and speed are the business requirements that will be served as customers begin their migration to services-based solutions,” said Agassi. “This next wave of innovation will be enabled not just by the technology infrastructure but by agreement on a common language of business, which will give customers the ability to change processes very rapidly to address their growing needs. SAP is working to deliver both the infrastructure and the common business semantics to enable global businesses to operate.”

In order to build out the Web services that are essential for business, SAP is providing the solid foundation for companies to grow their businesses through a business process platform based on SAP NetWeaver®. SAP is continuing to invest in building out a robust partner ecosystem, an ecosystem that will leverage these business services to drive a new wave of innovation that provides customers with the nimble solutions they require.

“Today information is power,” said Agassi. “Our focus is to empower all employees, not just select few, by allowing them to effectively tap into and leverage the data that resides on their SAP and non-SAP systems. SAP believes that people like their current user experience, but want business process context to be part of it. We want business users to utilize this data to accomplish daily tasks in more productive ways and make complex tasks simple.”

Project Mendocino, the joint initiative between SAP and Microsoft to revolutionize how information workers leverage enterprise applications and desktop productivity tools, is an example of how two companies can work together in the new Web-services environment to deliver a powerful solution that saves customers time, resources and money.

Agassi concluded his speech by highlighting what the audience can expect to see from SAP in the near future.

“There are three things that SAP has built as the foundation for our global business during the past 30-plus years – a promise to continue producing the best products in the market; an ethical commitment to increasing shareholder and stakeholder value through strong financial results and commitment to all people in SAP and our eco-system; and the ability to maintain our leading market share position through organic growth of our business,” said Agassi. “We’re 100 percent committed to innovation as well as enhancing what is already the strongest software portfolio in the market. SAP has been a leader for three decades in anticipating what will be the next technology wave and then delivering the right solution at the right time, and we will continue to do so for decades to come.”