Thanks for this conscientious and thought-provoking comment. This is an ongoing debate, and I really welcome your perspective.

Everyone else following this discussion should feel free to chime in.

Best,

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

While I do understand your position (or rather SAP’s) relative to <a href="http://Salesforce.com" title="http://Salesforce. " target="_blank">Salesforce.com</a> and Web 2.0, I think you are missing one very key point: the end game for companies is how much more easier can they sell their products. REVENUE IS KING. If a sales or channel manager can go out to SFDC and (with a credit card) get an application that helps him close deals sooner, why would he attempt to venture down the traditionally long process of bringing in another enterprise system?

That isn’t to say that the virtues of a completely integrated system like SAP should be overlooked. It’s just that I don’t see SAP making a real commitment of providing Mash-Up capabilities with other applications like SFDC. Oh yeah, there’s Netweaver, but it is my experience, and the opinions of others (Seeberger, iWay, Microsoft), that NW is good for SAP to SAP NOT SAP to Non-SAP.

I think the best example came at last year’s 2007 Configuration Workgroup conference in Salzburg. An SAP user was confounded on how to get his indirect channel partners to get opportunities and customer order needs into their SAP system. The unanimous response was to make the channel partners use SAP CRM.

Now here is the question: Who’s going to pay for that?

The moral of the story is get SAP to open itself up so developers in other systems can drop in an SAP web part as easy as any other VB object.

Just my thoughts

Ken Noll
Cincom Systems, Inc. (SAP ISV partner)