The deal, announced Oct. 17 at the SAP TechEd conference in Munich, was coupled with news that the vendor is attempting to get closer to the open-source community and also push further into the enterprise SOA (service-orientated architecture) market.

SAP, which is currently in the transaction phase of buying Business Objects, will embed the Yasu rules infrastructure into its NetWeaver technology, giving the company a broader footprint in the business process management market.

Klaus Kreplin, corporate officer and member of the Executive Council, head of SAP NetWeaver Technology, at SAP, said; "This is another example of an acquisition that fits into our architecture. [Yasu] runs on Java and fits nicely and does not come with any baggage. This is a pure technology acquisition; it is not about market share." He said the vendor intends to use Yasu technology to help the business process community to centrally manage their business rules and comply with regulatory compliance.

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Also announced at the conference, SAP said it is contributing software capabilities to the Eclipse community. For the first time the vendor is allowing developers to build enterprise applications within Eclipse—the integrated development environment for open source—that were previously only available to the NetWeaver community.

Click here to read why the SAP-Business Objects deal is leaving the market in turmoil.

"The theme of this TechEd is 'Putting the power of the enterprise to work,'" said Zia Yusuf, executive vice president of the Global Ecosystem and Platform Group at SAP. "Eclipse is part of a broader effort by SAP to promote open standards and engage more closely with the open-source community." He said one of the challenges when programming is that Java developers need to take care that there are no memory leaks and keep track of the amount of memory the coding is using. "A memory analyzer tool has now been built into Eclipse to work out exactly how much memory applications are using," he added.

The vendor also unveiled an extension of its training program for partners and end users in the enterprise SOA space, with the launch of its Enterprise Architect Certification Program.

"We are seeing a change from our competition," said Kreplin. "What is happening is that the traditional players are not competing against each other, they are competing with their ecosystems, so now it has become a battle between ecosystems."

This, according to Yusuf, is why the vendor is looking to drive skills and training of its ecosystem. "In the transition to enterprise design business process, education becomes important, so we wanted to deepen our SOA program, which should speed adoption rates," he said.

The role-based training for enterprise architects has three levels: Associate certification, Professional certification and Master certification. "The adoption of enterprise SOA will become much faster in this technology cycle because of the sharing of knowledge and the quality and speed of this knowledge," said Kreplin.

According to the IDC, worldwide software spending for SOA-based initiatives is expected to grow to nearly $14 billion by 2011 and SOA-driven professional services engagements to $40.8 billion by 2011.

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