SAP Announces Business Suite 7

SAP has unveiled Business Suite 7, the newest version of its modular enterprise software designed to help businesses optimize performance while addressing specific challenges on their own timeline and without costly upgrades.

"The new innovation with Business Suite 7 is the notion of enhancement packages," said SAP executive board member Jim Hagemann Snabe. "Once you are on Business Suite 7, you do not need to upgrade for a long time because of the enhancement packs."

The new SAP Business Suite delivers more than 150 functional innovations through the enhancement packages, which let customers select and deploy only what they need without upgrading their solution. This delivery model has been used for the first three generations of SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP.

"The approach you need to take is an approach where you simplify consumption in areas where you don't differentiate. We have pre-defined, pre-configured and shipped these best practices for you, which means they are fast and cheap to implement. That is agility already; it means you can save costs, which is a starting point for managing the current [economic] situation," explained Hagemann Snabe.

"The next step is then making your own practices," Hagemann Snabe continued. "These are areas where you do differentiate; here you don't want to compromise. The SOA allows you to consume the transaction capabilities of the suite and build own practices without losing consistency. The combination is agility. You act fast to save costs, and you act fast in changing your business when the opportunity is there. That's Business Suite 7."

For the first time, Business Suite 7 will feature a synchronized release schedule for all applications across the entire suite, which include SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Supplier Relationship Management, SAP Supply Chain Management, and SAP Product Lifecycle Management, as well as industry applications.

Business Suite 7 is also design to help customers gain stronger business insights through analytics from SAP Business Objects, and achieve end-to-end process excellence through the modular deployment of industry best practices and service-oriented architecture (SOA).

"The traditional suite was a combination of these different applications, ERP, CRM, SEM, and the aggregate was the suite," said Hagemann Snabe. "We're taken a new approach to this modular thinking. Instead of looking at it from an IT point of view and siloing different applications, we took a look at the business. We tried to define end-to-end processes — we call them value scenarios — that help companies improve their business. These often go beyond the boundaries of the application silos."

"The modular approach in the Business Suite is really about finding the right groupings of functionalities that fit a specific end-to-end process need and excelling that, so we've spanned the application boundaries, we bring the functionality and the information together, and focus the end-user and the line of business owner on the business rather than the IT."

SAP Enterprise Support services offer integrated life-cycle management capabilities in the new suite. Underpinned by SAP Solution Manager, enterprise edition, SAP Enterprise Support allows customers to receive direct advice from SAP solution architects and can minimize their modifications, which allows them to manage their operations more cost-effectively.

SAP Business Suite gives businesses the ability to perform industry-specific and business support processes with modular software that is designed to work with other SAP and non-SAP software.

Business Suite 7 also incorporates select analytics capabilities from the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio. The suite is fully SOA-enabled, and will provide more than 2,800 enterprise services for all industries. As well, the SAP NetWeaver Business Process Management component of the SAP NetWeaver technology allows customers to build their own practices without sacrificing product integrity.

Atos Origin, Capemini, IBM and Wipro have become launch partners for SAP Business Suite 7, and will provide certified consulting resources and co-marketing activities while participating in the product ramp-up.

"SAP Business Suite 7 offers us powerful, differentiated industry-specific functionality and support for business processes, which furthers our strategy of IBM as a globally integrated enterprise by linking process excellence with our infrastructure capabilities," said John Leffler, global SAP practices leader, IBM Global Business Services. "We are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with SAP as mutual customers and partners."

Source: eChannel Line