SAP Announces Major Milestones Toward Comprehensive Delivery of Business Framework; Key Deliverables Include New Release-Independent R/3 Business Components, Expanded BAPI Library, Seamless DCOM Integration, and Java/CORBA Interoperability

Business Wire, August 25, 1997

ORLANDO, Fla.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 25, 1997--Today at SAPPHIRE(R) '97, SAP AG announced major milestones toward comprehensive delivery of its highly acclaimed Business Framework(TM), an integrated, open, component-based product architecture that encompasses SAP R/3(TM) enterprise applications and third-party products and technologies.

With these milestones, Business Framework provides SAP customers with greatly simplified systems upgrade and maintenance, increased interoperability between R/3, legacy systems, customer-specific and third- party solutions, and a more flexible platform enabling continual change.

With Business Framework, SAP takes responsibility for the whole technology stack -- including SAP as well as Complementary Software Partner solutions -- resulting in a significantly lower cost of ownership for R/3-based business systems.

"SAP's strategy for enterprise computing is to develop R/3 into a family of integrated components that can be upgraded independently," said Prof. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner, spokesman for the executive board and co-founder of SAP-AG.

"With this strategy, software upgrading -- the key problem of today's increasingly networked software systems -- becomes significantly less difficult and less painful. Our customers can shorten their time-to-market while simultaneously improving their business solutions."

Momentum for Business Framework surged with the unveiling of new independent components and new interface and integration technologies. Highlights of the expansion of Business Framework include the following: -0-

-- Componentization. SAP continues to make strides toward full componentization of the R/3 System with new financial components, an independent Human Resources component, the Business Information Warehouse(TM) component and new logistics components. In all, more than a dozen new components have been introduced, allowing much more agile and complete business solutions for SAP customers. Importantly, many of these components support both Release 3.x and 4.0 of R/3, enabling customers to take advantage of new functionality easily without having to upgrade their entire system. (See the R/3 Release 4.0 announcement and supporting news briefs for complete information.)

-- Integration. With R/3 Release 4.0, SAP has dramatically increased the number of application link enabling (ALE) distributed integration scenarios. ALE scenarios guarantee the integration of multiple components at the business process level by providing the necessary semantic synchronization. With the increase in ALE scenarios, SAP customers achieve a new level of flexibility for the distributed deployment of their R/3 System.

-- Extended supply chain. The SAP initiative for supply-chain optimization, planning and execution (SCOPE) combines the strength of the R/3 enterprise resource planning solution with new SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO) products and technologies, third-party specialized products and comprehensive business intelligence capabilities such as the SAP Business Information Warehouse. The SAP SCOPE initiative extends Business Framework by offering additional business application programming interfaces (BAPIs) and an APO solution delivered as a component. It also incorporates new technologies such as liveCache, a memory-resident data-object processing capability. (See the SCOPE announcement for details.)

-- Technology deliverables. New technology deliverables include the following:

- The Business Client(TM), which provides client-component enabling technology for executing ActiveX Controls and JavaBeans applets at the presentation layer, achieving a new degree of personalization for the end-user interface.

- Seamless DCOM integration with BAPIs under Business Framework. For the first time, this enables DCOM-based component-level integration between BAPIs and the full range of Microsoft development and run-time technologies, including Microsoft Transaction Server.

- Open standards compliance through BAPI access from CORBA-compliant object request brokers (ORBs) through work with technology partner Visual Edge Software Ltd. of Quebec, and through supporting Open Applications Group (OAG) specifications.

- Rapid adoption of advanced technology, such as memory-resident object storage, through technology independence provided by Business Framework. (See the Business Framework news briefs for details.)

-- BAPI availability. The number of available BAPIs has more than doubled as a result of the componentization of the core R/3 System; BAPIs now are available for virtually all application areas. BAPIs can be accessed easily from leading development environments, including Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual J and IBM Visual Age. Also, BAPIs can now be incorporated into 100% Pure Java applications. New support is provided for both synchronous and asynchronous BAPIs.

"Business Framework is an excellent model for delivering flexible, component-based enterprise business solutions -- and one that SAP is quickly turning into reality," said Joshua Greenbaum, senior consultant for Hurwitz Group Inc.