SAP Leads Industry Collaboration in Support of Enterprise Services

BOSTON, Mass. - Sept. 27, 2005 - Along with an impressive list of key industry partners, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced it continues to deliver on its vision of a business-driven approach to services-oriented architecture by creating the first cross-industry community process for enterprise services. Driven by George Paolini, who leads SAP's Platform Ecosystem group, the newly formed Enterprise Services Community Process will incorporate many of the successful attributes of open community processes such as Eclipse and the Java Community Process, adding additional momentum to SAP's market-leading progress in driving real-world applications of enterprise services for customers.

In addition to the Enterprise Services Community Process, SAP also announced the addition of seven new technology titans to a growing community that will license Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), SAP's blueprint for a business-driven approach to services-oriented architectures, enabled by the SAP NetWeaver® platform. The announcements were made at SAP TechEd® '05, one of the industry's largest, hands-on technical education conferences, being held in Boston, Massachusetts, Sept. 27 - 30. 

Enterprise Services to Flourish from Partner, ISV, Customer Collaboration



With the introduction of the community process, SAP is taking a leadership role by creating the industry's first open forum that fosters developer collaboration in creating, consuming and running enterprise services and helps guarantee the quality of customer implementations. The need for such a forum was driven by the swift pace of partner alignment around ESA. For the first time, a community process in which collaborative business process innovation can flourish in an open and transparent forum will become the standard by which all enterprise services development is measured. The Enterprise Services Community Process is the only industry-driven method for defining enterprise services and is poised to become the preferred method for the SAP customer and partner ecosystem to achieve business process innovation through the use of enterprise services. Enterprise services use standard Web service technology to capture a "common language of business." This common language enables solutions from independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs), partners, customers and SAP to compose innovative business processes on top of enterprise services while ensuring integrity of the business as well as robustness and speed of execution.

As part of the community process, ISVs and technology companies will be given the opportunity to achieve the "Enterprise Services-Ready" brand for their products through a certification process that ensures the implementation and consumption of enterprise services as defined by the community. "Enterprise Services-Ready" solutions are using standard Web services technology to provide enhanced flexibility, faster time to market, reduced cost of ownership and diminished risk for customers. 

The presence of governing rules, expert groups and other traditional procedures used to create a community-based forum will shape the newly formed Enterprise Services Community Process with the aim of continuously delivering value and renewed relevance for members. With community members, SAP is committed to building an overall climate of trust and involvement. Through knowledge sharing and access to information, the community process will attract members to engage and consistently bring to market world-class innovations that will fuel the evolution of next-generation business solutions. Some of the companies that are involved in helping SAP refine the Enterprise Services Community Process include Adobe, EMC Corporation, Intel, Mercury Interactive Corporation and Symantec. 

George Paolini, execute vice president of Platform Ecosystems, SAP AG, will drive the new Enterprise Services Community Process. Prior to joining SAP, Paolini was the founder of the Java Community Process, the widely renowned forum that energized a revolution in software programming that today has Java recognized as one of the most widely used technologies globally.

"With this new wave of partner alignment around enterprise services, we expect to bring thousands of enterprise services to life for our mutual customers through community collaboration," said Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and member of the executive board, SAP AG. "Customers win when the ecosystem collaborates on a timely delivery of innovative technologies that solve deployment and integration issues. This architectural shift is happening now, and SAP is the only solution provider to bring together an enterprise-scale blueprint with ESA, an enabling platform in SAP NetWeaver, an available repository of more than 500 enterprise services, and now with Enterprise Services Community Process, a foundation of a collaborative process for building enterprise services." 

Companies interested in learning about and joining the community process can sign up for updates at https://www.sdn.sap.com/sdn/index.sdn?page=escp.htm or by emailing to escp@sap.com, as well as at the SDN Clubhouse at SAP TechEd '05 in Boston this week. Additional background is also available on SAP's unveiling of an Enterprise Services Architecture preview system. (See related press release titled, "SAP Previews More than 500 New Enterprise Services," available at:

http://www.sap.com/company/press/press.epx?PressID=4515)

Global Technology Leaders Support ESA



Just four months after announcing the first wave of technology "titans" who agreed to license ESA, SAP revealed that Avaya, Dell, HP, Network Appliance, Novell, Research In Motion and RSA Security will license ESA with the intent to provide "Enterprise Services-Ready" solutions. These companies join market leaders in hardware; networking; data storage and management; security; intelligent documents; desktop productivity applications; forms and user experience technologies; and testing and system management who previously announced their alignment around ESA. (See related press release titled, "Technology Titans Align Around Enterprise Services Architecture from SAP to Provide 'Enterprise Services-Ready' Solutions," available at:

http://www.sap.com/company/press/Press.epx?PressID=4629)

The licensees of ESA will receive early access to SAP's growing catalog of technical information on enterprise services, the tools and capabilities to work with the architecture and development information such as data schemas, user interfaces, application models and security features necessary for automation of business processes on top of enterprise services. In addition, these ESA ecosystem partners will receive fully featured development and run-time tools that allow them to immediately build, test and certify "Enterprise Services-Ready" solutions. 

These leading organizations are focusing on enterprise services as the common denominator to ease deployment and co-operation of technologies across the IT stack in order to reduce the risk and cost for customers. By extending application functionality deep into the IT stack, SAP is making the entire stack "business process aware." 

SAP's vision of a shift to a services-based approach was first introduced in January of 2003 with the unveiling of ESA. Since then, more than 1,500 reference customers have begun the process of service-enabling their business processes across their entire IT landscapes by implementing and using SAP NetWeaver, the industry's first platform to successfully demonstrate the convergence of applications and infrastructure that enable the ESA blueprint. 

Partner support for Enterprise Services Architecture is underscored in the associated addendum to this press release.

About "Enterprise Services-Ready" 



SAP has established "Enterprise Services-Ready" to identify products that incorporate the Enterprise Services Architecture, leveraging the power of business process services in the enterprise. This standards based certification ensures that SAP and partner ISV solutions that are "Enterprise Services-Ready" are able to extend ESA functionality across the IT landscape, to help organizations design, deploy, run and maintain innovative business processes at lower cost and higher flexibility. Industry support for Enterprise Services-Ready and ESA as the enabler of flexible, next-generation business continues to grow, already adopted by Adobe, Avaya, Computer Associates, Dell, EMC, HP, Intel, Macromedia, Mercury, Microsoft, Network Appliance, Novell, Research In Motion, RSA Security, Symantec and

VERITAS.

About SAP



SAP is the world's leading provider of business software solutions*. Today, more than 28,200 customers in over 120 countries run more than 96,400 installations of SAP® software-from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize enterprises to suite solutions for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver® platform to drive innovation and enable business change, mySAP™ Business Suite solutions are helping enterprises around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP industry solutions support the unique business processes of more than 25 industry segments, including high tech, retail, public sector and financial services. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." (Additional information at <http://www.sap.com>)

(*) SAP defines business software solutions as comprising enterprise resource planning and related software solutions such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, product life-cycle management and supplier relationship management.