At the SAP Teched, An announcement made was that SAP is evolving the product release map for mySAP 2005, indicating that mySAP 2005 will be the cornerstone of thier strategy moving forward. Delivering on its commitment to help customers experience the business value of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA).

Moving forward, all new functional enhancements to mySAP ERP through 2010 will be made available as extensions to mySAP ERP 2005 in a series of optional enhancement packages, eliminating the need for customers to continually upgrade their systems to take advantage of the newest technology and business process innovations from SAP. This was a theme that Shai Aggasi highlighted in his key note "refering to the CIO who said the core can be touched once every 5 years but still wanted innovation during this period, but wanted the system to be down only on saturday and more specifically one hour on saturday"

mySAP ERP 2005 is the "go-to" release for all customers running SAP R/3. Together with SAP NetWeaver 2004s and enterprise services, mySAP ERP 2005 serves as a stable business process platform on top of which these enhancement packages will enable continuous business innovation.

With this move, SAP is the first and only enterprise software provider to leverage enterprise SOA to benefit customers by transforming the way they can consume new features and functionality. This move also sends a strong message to the SAP ecosystem by providing them with a stable platform on which to innovate for several years.

Enhancement packages will be optional, offering customers the flexibility and power to choose new capabilities that best meet their business needs. Enhancement packages may contain new functionality-such as talent management and financial collaboration capabilities-innovations to streamline implementation of shared services, industry-specific enhancements, and enterprise services. The first enhancement package is scheduled to be available in December 2006.

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Prashanth Rai