Live from Sapphire, Berlin: During yesterday's press conference, Henning Kagermann, co-CEO of SAP, was asked why he had not made any references during his key-note to "enterprise 2.0, like IBM had been doing lately." Kagermann's response was, "we have a fundamentally different approach.... It doesn't help anyone to talk about E 2.0. I want to show what we do." Specifically, he wanted to talk about the central goal of collaboration throughout a company's eco-systems of suppliers, partners and customers, enabled by SAP's NetWeaver platform. That's the big vision of Business Network Transformation, an intellectual stake in the ground for a strategy based on the sum of the different companies' parts being bigger than the whole.
What about all those lovely things that E 2.0 evangelists enthuse about? Yes, well, SAP does not brag about it but there is a tacit admission that other vendors are happily welcome on NetWeaver Even on the company's SDN/BPX networks, now with 1.2 million members globally, the more ubiquitous social tools such as wikis and discussion forums are built on Confluence and Jive. In fact, just last month SAP Services announced that it was building its collaboration platform on Plexus, a version of Jive's ClearSpace (running on NetWeaver) that is being adopted to the needs of Services' Eco-System. SAP is focused on the big picture and the business case for innovation through networks. It's refreshing, actually, to hear in Kagermann's dismissal that the heart of Enterprise 2.0 is not the bells and whistles but the, excuse the expression, "backbone" (referred to with a sense of historic irony) of enabling collaboration and "closing the loop between strategy and execution."
Call it Enterprise 2.0 or just a whole new level of mobile integration, SAP's own network transformation in its partnership with Research In Motion, Mobile CRM allows for full integration between Blackberry and CRM Enterprise. Through text messaging, sales people can update their call information, and from Blackberry they can get contact details. Paul Greenberg at MyCRMCareer, who saw it demo'd at Sapphire in Orlando, blog calls it the most comprehensive mobile solution for CRM out there....