Tuesday, March 06, 2007
Happy 10th birthday, NetWeaver
Happy 10th birthday, NetWeaver: "To bring the discussion full circle, even MDM has historic roots. In an interesting series of lectures that are available for download at Plattner's Institute's Web site, SAP founder Hasso Plattner covers the history of enterprise application computing using (of course) R/2, R/3 and their follow-on products as examples. He begins by describing the real-time-integrated nature of the very first mainframe-based R/2, when everything else at that time (MAPICS, J.D. Edwards, etc.) was batch or file transfer-based, and he shows how that feature and function was brought over to R/3. Plattner then gives SAP's admittedly weak argument for splitting BW, as well as CRM and SCP, apart from the transactional ERP system, which SAP began to do in the 1996 timeframe. With this change, SAP was no longer truly 'real-time integrated.'
Plattner says he never really favored the split; he notes that this design decision is why SAP applications at the time of the lecture (as of early 2006) have three different customer data definitions (in the CRM instance, the mobile sales instance and the ERP instance). He is happy to say that SAP will have the data definitions back together by 2008 under NetWeaver. This is what NetWeaver MDM is all about. "
Plattner says he never really favored the split; he notes that this design decision is why SAP applications at the time of the lecture (as of early 2006) have three different customer data definitions (in the CRM instance, the mobile sales instance and the ERP instance). He is happy to say that SAP will have the data definitions back together by 2008 under NetWeaver. This is what NetWeaver MDM is all about. "
