Can you name one of the top-3 software companies in the world that is developing some of the most advanced technology, offers one of the sexiest AJAX-powered user interfaces, develops successful partnerships within a fast-growing ecosystem of independent software vendors, is one of the most active contributors to the most widely used Open Source projects, and has one of the most loyal developer groups around? If you cannot, let me help you. Its logo is blue, but it’s not the big one, and its developers meet at a conference called TechEd, but it’s not headquartered in Redmond, WA. You got it! Please let me introduce you to the new SAP.

I am in Las Vegas for SAP TechEd with Michael Cote, Mark Crofton, Tim Marman, Mike Masnick, Niel Robertson, and Charlie Wood. Back in May, SAP was one of the first IT vendors to invite bloggers to cover its user conference, SAPPHIRE. Today, they did it again, this time around for their developer event.

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.

On the technology side, the Business Process Platform is coming together. It does not have the advanced process orchestration capabilities that I would like to see at this level of the stack, but the composition tools that were showcased during Shai’s keynote sure look like a step in the right direction. The Business Intelligence Accelerator is also very impressive. If BI can be made sexy, BAI certainly is one way to do it. The user interface is extremely slick — I love the spaghetti effect when refreshing charts — and performance improvements of up to 100x sure look good.

On the user interface side, Muse is one of the sexiest user interfaces I’ve seen for any large enterprise application, and the folks from SAP Labs in Palo Alto keep innovating with some sweet eye candies. Learning a couple of tricks from Apple, they took Konfabulator, now owned by Yahoo!, and built a really cool workflow task list that can be displayed on any desktop. They also added a voice activated interface for it, demonstrating that getting all the data in one place and providing multiple interfaces for it is possible, but most importantly useful. Now, being the Office 2.0 biggot that I am, I’d love to get a version of this that I could use as a NetVibes portlet, or Google Homepage component, without having to install anything on my computer. Note to Eric Wood: I love your widgets, give us more of them!

On the partnership side, SAP is changing too. It used to be difficult for an independent software vendor based outside of Germany to develop a meaningful partnership with SAP. And a strong case of not-invented-here syndrome made it virtually impossible for SAP to bring innovation in through acquisitions. This is changing. The NetWeaver ecosystem is now strong of more than 400 vendors, and successful acquisitions of companies such as Virsa are clear evidence that SAP opened up to the outside world. This ecosystem is nowhere near as strong as what IBM has been nurturing over the past fifteen years or so, but it’s growing fast. There are a couple of things that SAP could do to take it to the next level, and I’ll write about it tomorrow.

On the community side, SDN has over 500,000 registered users today. It makes it one of the largest communities of developers in the world. Not yet on par with Microsoft’s 8M Visual developers, or Sun’s 3 million Java folks, but definitely comparable to Oracle’s community of PL/SQL experts. Now, this group of half a million might overlap quite significantly with the half million folks who have been trained to ABAP, therefore SAP must go the extra mile to reach out beyond its existing base. One initiative of interest to me is the work on scripting languages promoted by folks like Craig Cmehil, which is a good way to engage with a broader community of developers who might prefer PHP to ABAP — not that I fully understand why anyone would…

On the product side, the biggest announcement to come out of TechEd is the one on mySAP ERP 2005, which is now presented as the stable core that SAP customers should migrate to, from their existing R/3 4.6c or 4.7 deployments. SAP is committing to keep this core stable for the next five years, and to release two to three enhancement packages every year. Setting a clear update target is a smart move, which seems to be coming right on time. According to Peter Graf, more than half of SAP’s customers running R/3 4.6c or 4.7 today should have upgraded to mySAP ERP 2005 by 2008. This seems realistic, and SAP is doing a pretty good job building a compeling business case for it. Migration tools have been significantly improved as well, and the experience of early adopters that have done this upgrade already should help. This won’t make it significantly easier for the very largest SAP customers that are running hundreds of heavily-customized instances of R/3 today, and this is where BPM 2.0 could provide part of the answer. Note to the Business Process Platform folks: feel free to call us, we’d love to help.

Finally, Shai Agassi clarified a lot of issues related to SAP’s contribution to the Open Source community. Taking the LAMP stack as an example, he reminded our group of analysts and bloggers that SAP R/3 was the first ERP to be certified for Linux, and that SAP Ventures invested in both MySQL and Zend, original developers for the massively successful PHP scripting language. Arguably, SAP is one of the large IT vendors that is making the most significant contributions to the Open Source community today, but it could — and should — do more. As Shai made it crystal clear, SAP is neither a platform company, nor a technology company, it’s an application company. In his own words, it’s the company that can best “codify business processes into applications.” I wholeheartedly agree with him, and would push the thinking a step further: if SAP is an application company, then SAP should open the underlying platform — NetWeaver — to a broader audience. As advocated before, SAP should make NetWeaver available under an Open Source license, or at least release some Community Edition for it under very favorable licensing terms for ISVs, much like IBM did with WebSphere. I will write about this some more tomorrow.

Overall, I think that SAP is doing a phenomenal job of opening up to the world. Its support for enterprise bloggers will most likely turn into a use case for how corporations can foster conversations with the community at large, while preserving the integrity of all parties involved. My only piece of advice there is pretty simple: keep doing what you’re doing today.

At this point, I can only look forward to SAPPHIRE ‘07 in Atlanta.