Business unusual

WHILE MANY a multinational company, especially an IT multinational, is feeling the pressure of the economic crunch, German enterprise software vendor Software AG`s performance is bucking the trend.

It would seem that the gamble it took, about five years ago, to widen its net from just selling Adabas database management systems and Natural applications, to the middleware market with products for service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process management (BPM), business integration and application modernisation, has paid off handsomely.

So handsomely that Software AG has managed to nearly double its revenue in the last five years to $1 billion, or  720.6 million, in its last financial year (ended 31 December 2008).

Research firm Gartner went so far as to note that "Software AG posted 30% growth in the AIM [application infrastructure and middleware] market during probably one of the worst quarters the IT industry has seen (4Q08)".

TURNING POINT

Dr Peter Kűrpick, Software AG`s chief product officer, attributes his company`s success to its decision, taken five years ago, to pay closer attention to the needs and demands of clients. And what clients were demanding was personalisation, BPM systems and SOA. Kűrpick was in SA recently to address Software AG`s 2009 user conference.

He pointed out that Software AG`s main aim was to solve today`s critical business process challenges, in supply chain and sales automation, for example.

"We do this by taking a business performance-driven approach, and allowing business and IT to speak a common language through the use of key performance indicators, namely visibility, efficiency, agility and process assurance.

More often than not, he remarks, clients have existing IT landscapes, which are like a whole city unto their own - all heterogenous and different from that of every other company, and you can`t just go in and "rip and replace" entire areas of the city.

How Software AG works is that it goes in and helps a client to reorganise aspects of their IT environment - the ERP, CRM, BI, mainframe and data management components, then to align the systems, and it then places an SOA enablement layer over these components that allows for process monitoring and improvement on the part of the client. "We help to deliver BMP modernisation projects in a modern way," remarks Kürpick. "Our core competency is as a software company that focuses on heavyweight corporate problems. What we deliver is a technology platform for both business and infrastructure solutions," he adds.

FUTURE FORWARD

Within the next six months, in Q4 of this year, Software AG will be launching Web Methods 8.0, describing it as the first integrated business service repository. What this will mean for users is that BPM and SOA will be in harmony. The unified, Eclipse-based management and administration system offers not only content-aware, intelligent portal-based applications, but also process analytics for knowledge workers through embedded BI.

Looking forward, says Kűrpick, Software AG`s vision for technology platforms for business solutions in 2009 is to allow for more collaborative processes discovery and design, to allow for more ad hoc processes, and form and document driven processes.

"The data flowing through an organisation will increase dramatically. There will be a time when processing even has to be done in real time, so business event processing is going to become a reality. We`re working on it, and we will have our first solution out by early next year," he adds.

By 2012, says Kürpick, the focus in business solutions will be on extreme ease of use - moving from a centralised way of deploying processes and applications to a departmental customisation of processes and applications.

And by 2015, business collaboration will be a focus, particularly in terms of self-service for the business user and broad collaboration without organisational boundaries.

As for Software AG`s vision for technology platforms for infrastructure solutions, by 2009 its focus will be on IT agility; by 2010 it will be on large-scale IT, by 2012 its focus will be on automatic IT scalability, and by 2015 it will be on on-demand expansion, indicates Kürpick.