Accenture develops NetWeaver specific solutions

BANGALORE: For global IT services major Accenture, SAP services is one of its seven main corporate priorities. The company took some active steps to strengthen its position in the space by starting a dedicated global SAP NetWeaver initiative two years ago. This program is aimed at educating developers on enterprise service architecture and SAP Netweaver architecture through workshops around the world.






More recently, Accenture opened an innovation center for Netweaver at SAP's global headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. Both the companies are co-developing products around the NetWeaver platform.





Some of the engineers from Accenture's Indian delivery center also work at the center. "The idea is to get close to the developers and product owners at SAP. This makes it easy for us to work closely with them and guide them about the product direction, get their input on their plans so that we can target our solutions to match their products," said Jon Hill, who leads Accenture Global Business Solutions's SAP NetWeaver program.





The company is currently working on two products- xIEP(short for Integrated Exploration and production) for the oil exploration industry and another called "Azure" for the banking and insurance sector.





Explaining the features of xIEP, Mark Kaplan, associate partner, Accenture Australia, said, "It is a composite application that uses the Netweaver technology stack to drill down to a number of different components. What it seeks to do is to help the oil industry see through the entire process of a platform dropping a new well into a 20-year life cycle of managing production and maintenance of assets till the closure of the rig."





Besides these, Accenture is also developing some core applications to drive payment and claims engines, which would help SAP make way into the financial services space.





Hill said that xIEP's asset maintenance component is available and is currently used by three large global energy companies. There are another eight processes that will be built on xIEP, he added.





Accenture also plans to develop vertical-specific solutions for areas like electronics and high-tech; utilities and the B2B space. Hill said that eventually these solutions would be available commercially. The company has around 300 NetWeaver customer projects, out of which a hundred are active projects.