Comments on: Why SAP Should Open Source NetWeaver

By: Venture Chronicles

Venture Chronicles — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 03:19:38 +0000

[…] Back on the technical point for just a minute, I wrote earlier that this future we are finding ourselves in is not about technology but about a business model. To be more direct, it’s my opinion that SAP and Oracle should be in a race to commoditize NetWeaver and Fusion Middleware respectively by giving it away to everyone - and I mean everyone - that wants it. This implies open sourcing it as a means of kicking distribution up, but whatever the vehicle it’s second order to the primary goal of making it broadly available for free. Ismael Ghalimi wrote a post last year that went into exquisite detail on why SAP should do this, you could substitute “Oracle” for “SAP” and it would still hold up. […]

By: IT|Redux

IT|Redux — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 04:50:10 +0000

[…] Back then, I wrote about SAP’s Business Process Platform, explained why SAP should Open Source NetWeaver, and advocated for duos in complement to Duet. Today, through Shai Agassi’s keynote and a couple of executive briefings, I got a nice update on what SAP is up to these days. Before getting into details, all I can say is that it’s not your father’s SAP anymore. The market for enterprise software is undergoing one of the major transformations it’s going through every ten years or so, and SAP is embracing these changes better than many other vendors I could think of. Here is what SAP is getting right, and here is where it could do an even better job. […]

By: Rika Ng

Rika Ng — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:15:40 +0000

A brilliant argument!

I just started learning Enterprise Portal as part of my new job scope, and Enterprise Portal is a decent portal and has many good pre-configured features.

However, I find it terribly over-engineered, making it rather cumbersome and painful, especially when it comes to web design work. Of all the components that can go open source, I believe that the Enterprise Portal is an ideal candidate simply because UI is not SAP’s core expertise and there are already many decent open-source portals and content management substitutes out there.

By: Venture Chronicles

Venture Chronicles — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:52:08 +0000

[…] Lastly, it’s somewhat ironic that Andy points to Josh Greenbaum’s piece given that Josh is a newly minted blogger. Josh was at SAPPHIRE and did a fine job, but the 10 bloggers we had at SAPPHIRE provided equally compelling commentary, if not eclipsing at times. […]

By: PacOwl

PacOwl — Sun, 28 May 2006 01:55:21 +0000

I would like to see NetWeaver open-sourced, but I don’t think SAP will do it unless they are in real trouble — and that’s going to take at least 5 years. I see it like Solaris. It was a great move for Sun, but only because of the position they are in. They never would have done it if the company was doing well. Open-sourcing NetWeaver now requires SAP to admit that they can’t compete with IBM and MSFT and ORCL in the enterprise platform arena, and they won’t admit that yet. I think in three years time, SAP will realize that most of their customers want nothing to do with NetWeaver as a platform — they want SAP to be their ERP vendor, not something else. That’s when the time will be right.

By: Ross Mayfield

Ross Mayfield — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:52:08 +0000

Absolutely spot on analysis. This would remove half of the risk of integration and create real options not only for higher level solutions, but reaching new markets.

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Tue, 23 May 2006 17:39:29 +0000

Ryan,

I guess it could, but then I have to ask the following question: what is better for SAP? For you to use an Open Source (free) version of SEM, or for you to use a competing product from Business Objects? In either case, SAP makes no money selling the product, but in the former case, SAP’s marketshare increases and SAP gets the opportunity of selling services on top of the Open Source layer.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Tue, 23 May 2006 00:50:38 +0000

Ismael,

What I meant was that NetWeaver opens up SAP for integration with solutions that may compete directly with SAP modules, at least to a certain extent. We directly needed a KPI Dashboard and the IT people were looking at SAP SEM, which is quite expensive, though richer in features. We ended up using a much cheaper solution: Infommersion from Business Objects, and for now gave up on SEM.

Could this happen to other SAP modules or solutions?

By: Dan Farber

Dan Farber — Mon, 22 May 2006 19:54:28 +0000

[…] Zoli Erdos goes deep on Duet, the Microsoft/SAP joint development effort. Ross Mayfield wrote about his Sapphire experience, calling it a "watershed moment for how enterprises engage in social media." Vinnie Mirchandani has several posts from his Sapphire sojourn. Ishmael Ghalimi provide his reasoning as to why SAP should open source NetWeaver. Niel Robertson ponders SAP’s proposed new corporate world order and promotes the role of the ‘chief process’ officer. […]

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Mon, 22 May 2006 17:55:32 +0000

Howard,

If you believe in SAP’s vision for the applistructure, they need to own both the infrastructure and the application, and make sure they work very well together, therefore deploying the mySAP Business Suite on the infrastructure of multiple vendors is not really an option.

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Mon, 22 May 2006 17:53:00 +0000

Ryan,

I’m not sure I understand the risk you’re referring to. Can you clarify?

The font is Trebuchet MS.

By: Howard Smith

Howard Smith — Mon, 22 May 2006 14:34:02 +0000

Whether or not SAP should “open source” Netweaver depends upon whether SAP needs the input of the open source community. Rather, SAP could be a user of open source software. There is, in reality, no need for them to provide these components. Better still, SAP could be platform independent.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 21 May 2006 17:06:57 +0000

Ismael,

NetWeaver could also lose some sales to SAP — we developed a business KPIs dashboard with Business Objects software and integrated it through NetWeaver for about $15,000, which is considerably less than buying their SEM module that in the end served almost the same purpose as our dashboard. There may be more to SEM that I don’t know about, but don’t you think they are taking a risk with NetWeaver, Open Source, etc.?

Also, in a non-related question — what font are you using for your blog? I use Lucinda Sans Unicode and it looks similar to yours, but it seems mine eats up more real estate. I like the compactness of your text.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Fri, 19 May 2006 14:36:40 +0000

Yes, very interesting, and with significant ramifications for IBM and Oracle (much more so for IBM). And, it’s a move not without a precedent. That is, SAP’s substantial investment in (and support of) MySQL is arguably its first move to open source a key part of its FUTURE middleware layer (in a round-about way).

Cheers,

Tuffers

By: Ismael Ghalimi

Ismael Ghalimi — Fri, 19 May 2006 11:23:12 +0000

Dennis,

I tend to over-simplify the picture and view SAP’s product offering as being made of two main components: the infrastructure (NetWeaver) and the set of applications that run on top of it. I am advocating the open sourcing of the entire NetWeaver stack, comprised of the application server, the integration broker, the service repository, the portal, the business intelligence engine, etc. I am not advocating the open sourcing of the applications, even though SAP has been shipping them with source code to customers for as long as I can remember.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Fri, 19 May 2006 03:25:01 +0000

Even though you are quite right to raise the issue, there’s a stack (no pun intended) of problems around this Ismael. First is the question of definition here. In other words, are you limiting your argument to the NetWeaver stack? It’s not the only game in town. Certain parts of the more traditional EAI stack — like messaging — I thought would have been fully commoditized by now. Apparently that’s not the case, at least in the financial services industry. Parts — like the portal — are easy targets.

I enlarge this thoughtstream at Integration Monitor.

By: Niel Robertson

Niel Robertson — Fri, 19 May 2006 02:21:53 +0000

Extremely well said. There is a lot to talk about in terms of commoditization of the new application operating system stack. This was a great lead into it!