The key message from Shai Agassi's keynote the roadmap for myERP 2005, defined by simplicity and innovation.
Shai discussed the challenge of a CIO who needs to innovate quarterly but only wants to touch the infrastructure once every five years (on a Saturday, no less). The solution is to deliver a stable core with incremental updates available as enhancement packages. This will allow companies to innovate on business demands rather than technical ones, deploying updates as they need them instead of trying to absorb major changes in the platform. The stable core will be myERP 2005, their business process platform released in June. As Peter Graf put it, we want to solidify the foundation so we can focus on move the standards up the stack, shifting from technical standards to higher-level standards built around business processes.
Enhancement Packages will allow innovation to be delivered by SAP itself, partners, and customers. SAP will release the first Enhancement Pack in December 2006. Tapping into the success of the SDN and ASUG communities, they expect to built a strong ecosystem of third-party innovation.
Shai emphasized repeatedly the importance of upgrading to myERP 2005, but said it should not be painful. They are providing an upgrade path, including a Solutions Browser which will automate the creation of business cases. From their experience, 92% of the upgrades were completed on time and 94% were completed under budget. There are 2,100 customers who have already licensed the new version, though only 107 (to be confirmed) have actually gone live with their deployments.