AP AG, at its Sapphire European user group conference in Amsterdam last week, previewed its next major release, revealed plans to enter the data warehouse arena, and feted its 10,000th installation-French cosmetics maker L'Oreal.
Version 4.0 of R/3, scheduled for release at year's end, promises to open up R/3's architecture and allow for easy integration with third-party software. In the past, R/3 came as a single, fully integrated package of financial, distr
ibution, manufacturing, and human resources applications. But due to a new object-based architecture, R/3 is slowly breaking apart into components.
"SAP has laid out a road map for the future, and it looks like they're delivering," says Jack Maynard, a senior analyst with the Aberdeen Group in Boston. "The object framework will benefit customers because they will be able to upgrade a piece at a time, instead of having to wait until the whole suite is ready."
Gunther Tolkmit, VP of global marketing for SAP, says R/3 will also be less painful to implement and modify thanks to an enhanced Business Engineer toolkit that allows data to be configured and redistributed within the system. This will be useful for companies that are adding or losing a business unit.
SAP also unveiled its Business Information Warehouse, a preconfigured data warehouse with an OLAP engine and a metadata repository that is integrated with R/3. This integration ensures that data in the data warehouse is in sync with information
in the application, and that changes passed through the R/3 transaction system are moved immediately to the data warehouse.
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AP AG, at its Sapphire European user group conference in Amsterdam last week, previewed its next major release, revealed plans to enter the data warehouse arena, and feted its 10,000th installation-French cosmetics maker L'Oreal.
