SAP Will Retrench With NetWeaver

Pop quiz: What is SAP's direction with NetWeaver? We couldn't answer that question either, so we traveled to SAP's TechEd conference in October to find out. NetWeaver is an also-ran in enterprise middleware but is vital to the many organizations that rely on SAP's enterprise applications. Our conclusion: SAP will shift its middleware investments to information discovery, analysis, business process coordination, and prediction rather than competing with application servers, new development frameworks, and enterprise integration and in advanced fields such as complex event processing. This means that customers should now look to independent vendors rather than to SAP for advanced middleware features and for a full middleware portfolio and should look to SAP for business process solutions that include both its applications and underlying middleware and for independent business intelligence (BI) and analysis tools.