SAN DIEGO—SAP’s TechEd conference here is proving to be an oasis of calm for corporate customers in an ERP (enterprise resource planning) software market that has been roiled by Oracle’s prolonged efforts to buy out PeopleSoft.
Peck said that while it will take a few years to catch on in the market, he thinks NetWeaver will give SAP a significant advantage in using Web-based programming for application integration.
The availability of the SAP applications had encouraged Symbol to move away from using i2 Technologies Inc.’s SCM (supply chain management) product, Peck said. The company found that the TCO (total cost of ownership) was considerably less when working with SAP’s application suite than with the i2 standalone product, “so they went with SAP,” Peck said.
Read more here about SAP’s strategy in building support for NetWeaver.
The application-integration potential of NetWeaver also interested Aleksey Pnev, a new technology analyst at PerkinElmer Inc., based in Shelton, Conn. PerkinElmer, a manufacturer of life sciences analysis equipment and biomedical imaging systems, wants to use NetWeaver to develop Web-based applications that will allow customers to order products, check inventory and get order-status updates, Pnev said.
PerkinElmer is now using Oracle 11i financial and manufacturing applications, as well as SAP applications, Pnev said. The company has already integrated the Oracle and SAP applications by using the WebMethods Inc. middleware technology, he added.
But the company is planning to switch to SAP applications “several years down the road” because NetWeaver offers the potential for better application integration and customer-service capabilities, he said.
“Plus, supporting two separate ERP systems is not cost-effective if they are providing similar functions,” Pnev said.
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