SAP Shindig on Netweaver or how I want to be a platform company

Thanks to Jeff Nolan, I got invited to a SAP Shindig in Palo Alto earlier today.  The whole executive board of SAP hosted a bunch of VC's this morning to talk about their "platform" strategy as well as to get our thoughts. 

I went with a fair amount of skepticism and walked away impressed and open-minded.  Some thoughts on the meeting:

• Henning and Shai did a very impressive job articulating the SAP platform - Netweaver.
• Shai is a terrific speaker - articulate, cogent, and skillful in his use of words
• Netweaver is a standards based platform built on SAP engines that 3rd party developers can build apps on.  The basic benefit is that if you build your app on Netweaver, it can semantically integrate with the rest of SAP's apps thus not forcing the customer into making a suite vs. best of breed decision (atleast in theory)
• They have established a set of rules around Netweaver such as:
  • Will not change the API's for 8 years
  • Will publish all the API's (no unpublished API's like Microsoft used to do)
  • All SAP applications will be built on the API's
  • Netweaver will be standards compliant
  • The application group will build applications on top of the API that will compete with partner applications
• The presence of the whole executive board reiterated the company's commitment to the strategy
• I talked to some of the board members informally and those conversation further reinforced SAP's commitment to this strategy.

Now am I going to rush out and get all my companies to port to the Netweaver platform.  Not really.  There are some companies of mine that sell into a largely SAP universe such as Steelwedge that can benefit from being Netweaver powered as large customers do integrate Steelwedge's planning and forecasting apps with SAP - See recent press release on how Air Products is using Steelwedge.  Challenges SAP still faces in getting ISV's to adopt are:

• Its not a "true" platform - I still need to make a database/operating systems/app server decision that is separate
• the platform does not offer a semantic level interoperability with the other platforms i.e. IBM, MSFT, etc.
• Most companies do not need an "another" platform - Open source is good enough and I do not need to pay a "tax" to use it
• Biggest value in joining an "ecosystem" is the sales and marketing push and unless SAP really invests in a "partner" program that creates some sales traction for their partners this program is not going to take off.

Btw they had Mark Feldman from Virsa on a ISV panelist who has benefited from the SAP relationship.  The guy was such an "ass kisser" that his credibility was zero.  Someone remarked to me that for a white guy he had a very brown nose ;-)   

Regardless, I do want to commend the SAP guys.  They made a strong case on Netweaver and were intellectually honest on what they do and don't do.  Any enterprise company targeting the global 2000 market should look at Netweaver - its definitely worth considering.