World tour points the future of IT as a competitive business weapon

Instead of focusing on internal efficiencies, IT priorities are changing to outward-looking interaction with customers and suppliers to meet market demands for flexibility, speed, and innovation.

This vision and strategy for enabling business change and increasing profitability is the theme of the 'The Best of SAP World Tour 2005' that takes in 38 countries and 110 cities and is currently on its Middle East leg.

SAP is the world's largest inter-enterprise software company and the world's third-largest independent software supplier overall, offering innovative IT solutions for a wide spectrum of business sectors worldwide.

The world tour aims to strengthen SAP's relationship with existing clients and promote its Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) adoption program, a new services-oriented architecture (SOA) that offers a formalised, step-by-step approach to help companies manage strategic transition based on their individual needs, while maintaining the productivity of existing systems.

Addressing an audience of business leaders and IT specialists in Dubai on Wednesday, SAP's Middle East managing director Sergio Maccotta stressed that business model innovation is the key to successful strategy.

'Whatever their size, companies will have to excel at a 'role' and participate in one or more 'value networks' while promoting IT to become a strategic weapon,' he said.

'Business/IT architectures in 2007 must focus resources on key business levers - enhancing the experience for customers, building better relationships with suppliers, and creating higher value partnership chains'.

'Increased responsiveness is imperative, enabling business to respond to change more effectively, exploit 'first to market' potential, and optimise end-to-end processes - rather than individual activities.'

SAP has pioneered the implementation of Enterprise Services Architecture with its NetWeaver comprehensive integration and application platform that enables users to work with their existing IT infrastructure to implement and manage change.

NetWeaver gives them the flexibility to rapidly design, build, implement, and execute new business strategies and processes, driving innovation throughout the organisation by combining existing systems while maintaining a sustainable cost structure.

SAP has joined forces with heavyweights such as Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, and Symantec in licensing agreement partnerships for NetWeaver that mark a major shift in the dynamics of the IT industry.

As a result, the ESA adoption program addresses client needs to harmonise business and IT objectives by providing services-based, enterprise-scale solutions and flexible IT infrastructures.

Maccotta urged his Dubai audience to think of ESA as a set of relatively autonomous units that can be managed independently, but operate together in a framework of common principles and service-level agreements.

'In SAP's view the future of enterprise applications lies in the competitive advantage they deliver - empowerment and real-time visibility plus differentiation and business innovation, plus productivity and business integrity,' he said.

'ESA is not just about IT, it is about the progressive discovery of new 'IT leveraged' business opportunities.

'ESA is the blueprint for accelerated business innovation and will be THE competitive advantage builder.'