SAP Portals Announces Open Unification of Enterprise Applications, Information and Services

Business Wire, March 21, 2002

Business Editors & High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 21, 2002

Next-Generation Enterprise Portal Technology Enables All Enterprise

Resources to Work Together To Increase Business Efficiency, Enhance

Relationships and Maximize Business Value

SAP Portals, Inc., a leading provider of open-enterprise portal and business intelligence products and a wholly owned subsidiary of SAP AG (NYSE:SAP), announced that the new release of the SAP Portals Enterprise Portal(TM) will deliver the most innovative design and cross-product integration available in a portal solution today.

New features of the Enterprise Portal include automatic content synchronization, an open knowledge management platform and the industry's first set of complete business packages. The SAP Portals Enterprise Portal transcends the basic information aggregation and Web-enabled access to applications provided by other portal solutions and unifies business processes across the enterprise. This enables organizations seeking to leverage vital enterprise information assets for strategic advantage and profitability to improve productivity, promote collaboration and swiftly resolve business events.

The SAP Portals Enterprise Portal's enhanced open unification platform now provides a new level of relevance and functionality to end users by eliminating traditional barriers to productivity created by disparate information, applications and services. As a result, appropriate information is delivered to the right person at the right time, intelligent decisions are supported, and, therefore, business throughput is accelerated. Users work seamlessly through a dynamic user interface to gain tangible increases in efficiency, quality and value through the unification of critical information sources including applications, data warehouses, unstructured documents, the Internet and Web services.

"The first impact we observed after launching the SAP Portals Enterprise Portal was a profound effect on our sales process," said Rich West, president of TriVirix International. "Potential customers reached a higher level of comfort with us as a potential partner sooner in the sales process because of our willingness and capability to share a broad spectrum of data in real time. This has translated into a shortened sales cycle and faster growth. Of course, the enterprise portal is a critical component in providing everyone with access to the same information, enabling us to better manage relationships and achieve increased comfort with existing customers. We also expect to achieve significant benefits in operational efficiency as our company grows."

The SAP Portals Enterprise Portal provides customers with a flexible, scalable, easy-to-administer enterprise portal with the following enhanced capabilities:

-- Unification delivers relevance and accelerates productivity by eliminating
traditional barriers between enterprise applications. Drag&Relate(TM)
capabilities allow users to relate information from disparate sources and
navigate multiple systems as one.

-- Business intelligence integration weaves data warehousing, reporting and
analysis, planning and simulation, and business performance management with
prebuilt business content to provide relevant and actionable business analysis
to a broad user base.

-- The new open knowledge management platform turns unstructured information
into accessible and usable organizational knowledge featuring advanced
categorizing and searching capabilities, collaborative functionality, and an
open repository framework supported by notification capabilities.

-- An extended Internet management architecture provides employees with access
to Internet content and services through pre-established role-based
permissions, leveraging industry standards for direct access to Web services
and extending the enterprise, all within the portal.

-- New business packages deliver relevant context through preconfigured
collections of premium portal content related to a user's business role in the
organization. The packages deliver tools while streamlining access for
immediate efficiency gains and minimized time to deployment.

"With the new SAP Portals Enterprise Portal, we are delivering on our vision to unify every business process in the ecosystem to drive business innovation," said Shai Agassi, chief executive officer of SAP Portals. "Only when users can unify all the vital assets of the enterprise, including applications, information and services, can they achieve true process collaboration and swift resolution of business events."

The SAP Portals Enterprise Portal supports open standards such as Java, J2EE, XML, SOAP and Microsoft .NET as well as security standards such as LDAP, Active Directory Services, PKI and X.509 and wireless and mobile device accessibility for anytime, anywhere accessibility to enable users and heterogeneous systems to interact across organizational boundaries. Single sign-on and session management eliminate the need for numerous passwords and user identifications. A multiserver approach allows for true enterprise scalability, in addition to intuitive server configuration tools that ease deployment and provide automated configuration tools.