BANGALORE, India, Nov. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Delivering on its commitment to help customers and partners experience the business value of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), SAP AG today announced rapidly growing momentum for the Business Process Expert Community. The community provides a collaborative environment in which business process experts can share information, experiences and best practices to leverage enterprise SOA to increase business agility. Since its formal launch just two months ago at SAP(R) TechEd '06 in Las Vegas, Nevada, the first open community for business process experts has rapidly grown to 60,000 members, nearly one-third of which are based in India. Today's announcement was made at SAP(R) TechEd '06, being held in Bangalore, India, Nov. 8 - 10.
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The Business Process Expert Community is designed to foster co-innovation in an open forum that caters to business process experts looking to drive business value from SOA -- regardless of whether they are SAP customers or partners. Members can collaborate and co-innovate by accessing and publishing blogs, discussion forums, wiki FAQs, articles, best practices, business scenario models, change management skills and SAP tools to help them deliver increased value to their organizations. Additionally, the community offers specialized vertical and horizontal topic areas to help business process experts leverage the expertise of peers in similar job functions and industries.
SAP is one of the first companies to offer model-driven tools as well as modeled composite applications specifically for this new category of professionals -- enabling business process experts to compose business processes themselves, reduce the need for coding and remove the traditional IT backlog, in part by improving business-to-IT communication, tools and processes. The role of a business process expert -- a key new job category borne from the evolution to enterprise SOA -- has evolved to encompass a variety of titles including business analyst, business consultant, process consultant, application consultant and process developer. A business process expert plays a critical role within companies of all sizes, bridging business and IT to accelerate business process innovation.
Business Process Experts Defined
The business process expert bridges the worlds of IT and business by bringing industry knowledge and business expertise to leverage composition software tools in order to increase business agility. Because SAP delivers model-driven tools, business process experts that are existing SAP customers have a distinct advantage in that they can leverage the SAP NetWeaver(R) platform to adapt, compose and execute business processes in real time, as needed, to accelerate innovation. The typical background of the 60,000-plus members that have already joined the Business Process Expert Community includes:
-- A deep knowledge of business-unit operations and core processes
-- Expertise in gathering requirements and modeling business process flows
-- Background as either a business person who has "gone technical" but has
few coding skills, or a former application developer moving toward the
business world
-- Knowledge of using simple queries to extract information from data
sources
"Business process experts now have an open forum in which they can sharpen their skills and share information, experiences and best practices to successfully leverage enterprise SOA," said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president, Platform Ecosystem, SAP. "And with the launch of the community, SAP is continuing to introduce new opportunities for its ecosystem and the industry as a whole to collaborate around business process innovation. The rapid growth of the community -- worldwide and in India -- has been exciting, and the tremendous positive response from business process experts further underlines the strong global interest in enterprise SOA. The community will only serve to deepen this interest, and we look forward to continuing this momentum."
India Brings Fast-Growing Membership to Business Process Expert Community
Reflecting their belief in SAP's enterprise SOA vision and the value of being part of a fast-evolving global community of industry experts, members from India have become the largest segment within the global Business Process Expert Community. Nearly 20,000 of the 60,000 community members are from India, translating into the highest share globally.
An employee of Wipro Technologies from Bangalore is the top contributor in the community -- demonstrating that global members are strongly committed to the community and to collaborating with other members around enterprise SOA.
"Wipro recognizes the Business Process Expert Community as a key link in SAP's enterprise SOA roadmap for its customers and partners," said Sangita Singh, senior vice president, Enterprise Application Services, Wipro Technologies. "Business knowledge and domain insights within organizations come from the experts, many of which may not be from the developer community. This new community will get many such people into the SAP ecosystem and thereby enhance the knowledge within it."
SAP Helps Companies Transition to Enterprise SOA
With the addition of the Business Process Expert Community to the SAP ecosystem, SAP's customers have even stronger reasons for moving to enterprise SOA. SAP's approach to enterprise SOA goes beyond SOA fundamentals by supporting business requirements through the use of enterprise services. SAP is both building service-orientation directly into its solutions and providing a technology platform (SAP NetWeaver) and guidance to support companies in the development of their own service-oriented architectures spanning SAP and non-SAP solutions.
SAP customers today have the ability to construct their own business-driven enterprise blueprints by combining multiple components from SAP's comprehensive suite of offerings around enterprise SOA. These include:
-- SAP NetWeaver -- SAP's business-ready, services-oriented platform for
enabling business growth through innovation allows SAP customers and
partners to extend the functionality provided by SAP solutions to meet
their specific business needs.
-- Enterprise Services -- Based on widely accepted SOA standards,
enterprise services represent a common business language that help
customers increase the ease and speed at which they compose new
business processes to support evolving business strategies and maintain
the integrity of business processes. SAP already has over 500 services
available through the latest release of SAP NetWeaver and mySAP(TM)
Business Suite. (See May 17, 2006 press release, titled "SAP Delivers
Industry's First Productized Enterprise Services")
-- Composite Applications -- SAP NetWeaver(R) Composition Environment
provides a lean, standards-based composition environment and offers
both developers and business process experts a visual, easy-to-use tool
to build and run complete composite applications to accelerate business
process innovation. Customers and partners can use the enterprise
services in SAP's repository to build their own composite applications
on top of SAP's application infrastructure. (See September 12, 2006
press release, titled "SAP Previews Next-Generation Composition
Capabilities for Partners")
-- Global Partner Ecosystem -- With over 1,000 partner ISVs and over 1,500
partner solutions on the SAP NetWeaver platform, SAP customers have
access to a comprehensive set of enterprise functionalities that can be
tailored to suit their own unique requirements.
-- SAP Discovery System -- Using SAP Discovery System, SAP customers and
partners have an opportunity to learn the value of business process
innovation and gain instant access to the latest software available
from SAP. No other vendor is providing such a simple and seamless entry
point on enterprise SOA roadmaps. (See September 12, 2006 press
release, titled "SAP Helps Partners and Customers Map Easier Path to
Enterprise SOA")
-- Consulting Services -- SAP Consulting recently launched a portfolio of
consulting services to deliver against the accelerating demand for
services that support companies' transitions to enterprise SOA. (See
October 18, 2006 press release, titled "SAP Consulting Accelerates
Customers' Enterprise SOA Road Maps")
The Business Process Expert Community provides a forum for customers and partners in similar job roles and industries to co-innovate, access resources and share best practices. Additional communities include SAP Developer Network -- SDN (sdn.sap.com), SAP Enterprise Services Community (esc.sap.com) and Industry Value Networks ( http://www.sap.com/community/pub/innovation/ivn/ ).
SAP(R) TechEd '06 in Las Vegas, Tokyo, Amsterdam and Bangalore
More than 15,000 SAP customers, partners and technical community are convening at SAP TechEd '06 to learn how to transform existing business processes and IT landscapes and take advantage of the power and flexibility of enterprise service-oriented architecture. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, SAP's largest ecosystem education event of the year offers more than 900 hours of lecture-driven and hands-on sessions. Following successful events in Las Vegas, Nevada, Sept. 12 - 15, Tokyo, Japan, Oct. 5 - 6 and Amsterdam, Oct. 18 - 20, SAP TechEd is being held in Bangalore, India, Nov. 8 - 10, 2006. For more information, please visit http://www.sapteched.com/.
About SAP
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software*. Today, more than 36,200 customers in more than 120 countries run SAP(R) applications -- from distinct solutions addressing the needs of small and midsize enterprises to suite offerings for global organizations. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver(R) platform to drive innovation and enable business change, SAP software helps enterprises of all sizes around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. SAP solution portfolios support the unique business processes of more than 25 industries, including high tech, retail, financial services, healthcare and the public sector. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." (Additional information at http://www.sap.com/ )
(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications such as supply chain management, customer relationship management, product life-cycle management and supplier relationship management.
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