CRN: How does the Powered by NetWeaver program work?
MOORE: Powered By NetWeaver is pretty heavily marketed into our existing partner base as well as members of SPN. Anyone can nominate themselves to be a member. SAP people can also nominate partners. It is a fairly simple process to become a member. Benefits are things like easier and cheaper access to SAP resources, as well as software and service and marketing opportunities. In contrast, becoming a member of the X-App program is a bit more complicated and rigorous because we're making a long-term commitment. We're making a commitment to our customers that buying this is as safe as buying any SAP software.
If you think about it, it is an ecosystem. You can't have two identical predators. So when we get into these very deep commitments with our partners that the X-App program represents, we have to select the one that we think is the best value for our customers. A couple of times where people have proposed very similar solutions, we had to make a call one way or the other.
CRN: What is the primary reason why SAP has outperformed its enterprise rivals over the last few years?
MOORE: Over the past few years, we've probably seen a fairly dramatic difference in our revenue picture versus some of our competitors. I would attribute a lot of that to having a much better understanding of the vertical industries than our competitors do. We are much more industry-specific with our products than most of our competitors are. If you're a pharmaceutical company, we have the pharmaceutical functionality. If you are a high-tech manufacturer, we have the high-tech manufacturing product. We have a very large fraction of the business processes that most companies need to operate, right out of the box. That reduces implementation time and upgrade costs. And now with the NetWeaver platform, we have a very simple way to allow you to extend that. One of the most attractive reasons partners work with us is that our market share is greater than the sum of the next four or five competitors combined.
CRN: How does your approach to Web services differ from IBM's and others?
MOORE: There are similarities and there are differences. Our architecture is really designed to enable companies to be more adaptable and have flexible application infrastructures. Our architecture is much more focused on application than on infrastructure and there are some functional differences. But in the end it all comes down to every vendor proposing a services-oriented architecture based on a very small set of standards that are rapidly consolidating. If you look at our DNA, you would probably understand where we're coming from. The components, the engines that will power the very complicated transactions, are not going to change very often. The transaction that does the payroll entry for an employee shouldn't change very often. The business process in which you pay people might change more frequently, but probably not that often. The business process by which you staff projects, on the other hand, might change relatively frequently. One of the key insights that we're all sharing is that there are these atomic components. There are composite applications that assemble them, and the business process and the components are separated. This is why you can use the same component across different countries, across different industries, on different user interfaces.
CRN: What impact will composite applications have on computing?
MOORE: The user experience is going to undergo a very significant change over the next two or three years. For example, one of the big changes that we'll have in enterprise applications over the next few years is that you won't file an expense report as a transaction. You'll file a transaction report as part of a process. You won't have to call somebody and say, "When am I going to get paid for this?" You'll have a dashboard where you can very quickly and easily see the status of anything you're doing.
CRN: How will composite applications change the way we view deployment of systems?
MOORE: One of the key things we're moving to with composite applications is that the cost of deployment will go down dramatically. First of all, you won't have to change from Siebel CRM to SAP CRM to get the composite application from SAP. It will work on both. So the cost of changing that infrastructure will go away. And a lot of the difficulties of connecting two systems will be at least reduced if not completely go away.
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