The Hindu Business Line : Focus on Netweaver at SAP TechEd

THE growing relevance of the Indian developer community became evident with SAP AG choosing to host the SAP TechEd 2004 event in Bangalore today. It is for the first time that the company has conducted the technology conference in the South Asia Pacific region.

As SAP's Indian arm gears up to play a key role in the company's R&D efforts, over 1,100 delegates dropped in at the SAP Labs Bangalore campus to participate in the company's technology vision for the future.

While TechEd 2004 would focus on various SAP applications including mySAP CRM, mySAP ERP and Financials SCM, the spotlight is on NetWeaver, the open integrated application platform from SAP.

With the technology vision of the business software enterprise centred around NetWeaver, a series of announcements have been made about the platform's extended capabilities.

These include extending the master data management capabilities of the application platform to provide a new object modelling framework and data normalisation features and a Java robust platform.

SAP has made `always-on' Java a reality on the NetWeaver platform by using a virtual machine that runs standard Java code. This minimises the impact of error situations on Java applications.

Mr Peter Zencke, Member of the Executive Board of SAP AG,said, "We have 200 people in the Indian facility working on NetWeaver and we expect this to increase to 400 by next year."

Accordingly, the company's hiring plans are to grow the Indian facility by adding 800 people on the R&D team and 500 people on the services and consulting side.

Currently, the Indian facility contributes 16 per cent to the company's global R&D efforts with 10 per cent of global patents filed by SAP generated from SAP Labs India.