Monday, November 06, 2006
SandHill.com | Management | Looking Forward with Shai Agassi
SandHill.com Management Looking Forward with Shai Agassi: "SandHill.com: Where do you see the enterprise software industry headed in the next 5-10 years?
Shai Agassi: From our perspective, SAP's future will consist of a unified application suite on top of an open platform. There will be a merger of middleware, a large collection of engines and applications - and that platform will serve as the foundation for the creation of flexible solutions that can be quickly deployed across this business platform.
That platform will abstract operating systems and databases to the degree that independent software vendors will not ask themselves whether they will build for this database or for that OS. ISVs will build for their collection of infrastructure processes. There will be very large collections of processes from a few vendors, perhaps three or four. Since there will not be many standards at first, it will be hard to migrate from one collection to another, so most customers and ISVs will invest in one collection. Each member of the ecosystem will choose to live in one of these ecosystems in order to survive and thrive. "
Shai Agassi: From our perspective, SAP's future will consist of a unified application suite on top of an open platform. There will be a merger of middleware, a large collection of engines and applications - and that platform will serve as the foundation for the creation of flexible solutions that can be quickly deployed across this business platform.
That platform will abstract operating systems and databases to the degree that independent software vendors will not ask themselves whether they will build for this database or for that OS. ISVs will build for their collection of infrastructure processes. There will be very large collections of processes from a few vendors, perhaps three or four. Since there will not be many standards at first, it will be hard to migrate from one collection to another, so most customers and ISVs will invest in one collection. Each member of the ecosystem will choose to live in one of these ecosystems in order to survive and thrive. "
