October 2nd, 2007
Posted by Dan Farber @ 4:10 pm

Peter Zencke, a member of SAP’s Executive Board and head of R&D, spent the last four years developing Business ByDesign, a new foundation for SAP’s ERP software. I caught up with him during SAP TechEd ‘07 and asked about the origins of the product and what will differentiate it in the marketplace. (See earlier coverage of Zencke’s TechEd ‘07 keynote and more SAP coverage here.)

DF: What was the genesis behind Business ByDesign?

PZ: “Four years ago, in 2003–exactly 10 years after R3 was introduced–we decided to go for new architecture, which we called “Ether” and then later “Enterprise SOA.” The first year we were figuring out how to do enterprise SOA. We built a prototype but decided not to productize it. We were just working on some principles during the first year. Early on we made a decision for a more rigid approach figure, one that we could not let flow to our ERP product SAP Business Suite.