What is SAP doing to service-enable its software? We have spent a great deal of time implementing our Enterprise SOA in SAP NetWeaver. We are opening our software up to an ecosystem of partners. But I'd like to open it up even further and try to integrate and utilize some of the open-source enterprise applications packages that are coming out. There are ERP systems and CRM systems out there that are not SAP, and to the extent we can allow them to integrate [with SAP], it would be a win for customers. The open-source packages out there, things like SugarCRM, aren't going to get tied in by accident. It will be a cooperative effort.
These sensors and RFID devices will generate huge amounts of data.How will companies handle that? One topic in our research group is event-enabling some of these things. As the data comes in, you want to only be notified of exceptional conditions, not the normal stuff. You only want to know the stuff that humans have to deal with.
How will you adapt to new hardware architectures? Hardware vendors are not just throwing new designs over the wall and expecting software vendors to swallow them. The situation is changing, where they are coming to us and saying, "What do you think we should put into our architectures for 2010?" They are asking, "What are the opportunities for parallel processing [and] virtualization?"
Will you adapt SAP software to take advantage of the kind of parallelism possible in multicore processor chips? There are levels of parallelism granularity that we are exploring: distributed parallelism; coarse-grained virtual machine; coarse-grained process parallelism; and medium-grained, thread-based parallelism. As far as I know, we're not looking at fine-grained, instruction-level parallelism, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone within SAP were looking at that as well.
What's needed in programming languages? The DNA at SAP is a deep knowledge of business process. But if you try to see where that knowledge is embedded in our software -- there are hundreds of millions of lines of code -- there is no one place that you can point to that embodies this deep knowledge. So I see a future world where the business process is embodied in a well-designed piece of software, where the modeling is made explicit and is understandable by a wider audience than the hard-core C++ software engineer. Think of something like a scripting language that is designed just to support the business process.