In a speech at the Software 2006 event, Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group and executive board member for SAP, said the first of the core trends is the need for a single unified platform to provide a repository of coherent services, enabling flexibility in the IT operation. He said this concept is at the heart of SAP's ESA implementation.
The second is the move to industry-specific application suites as opposed to horizontal and best-of-breed capability because Agassi said customers will derive a higher level of value from verticalized suites. Under the existing application and license suite structure, customers pay for everything regardless of what they actually use. In an SOA world, customers pay only for what they use, which has revenue implications for vendors. SAP, along with other enterprise application vendors, is having to consider new revenue models based on processes or highly granular services.
