At its Sapphire show in early May, SAP announced plans for the future release of two new tools: the Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Rules Management offerings, which will be added to its NetWeaver platform in the latter part of 2008.

"The new tools from SAP are aimed to provide the business process flexibility needed to enable customers to turn strategic business insight into real-world execution," stated SAP's announcement. "The addition of the planned capabilities will enable business process experts to design, model and immediately execute new or adapted business processes without having to develop code."

Madan Sheina, a principal analyst at Ovum who was at the Sapphire show, says that a element of excitement permeated the air as the NetWeaver BPM announcement took center stage in both of SAP's co-CEO keynote speeches.

One of the key messages from the BPM kick-off, as well as from the Sapphire show overall, was that SAP is attempting to add more flexibility to its product offerings, and BPM is a logical place to deliver the message: After all, BPM generates lots of buzz. (See "BPM: A Hot Area That's Still Immature" for more on BPM.)

In its announcement, the German software giant wasted no space in hammering home the attributes of the new BPM tool. The words agility, quickly, accelerate, flexibility, innovation and competitive advantage were repeated throughout.

"Process flexibility within SAP environments was the key message here [at Sapphire]," Sheina says. "SAP's been breaking away from the old image of rigid systems, rigid processes, expensive ABAP [SAP's programming language] programmers, and really trying to open itself up a little bit more."

SAP is trying to change its image because today's heterogeneous IT environments and companies' dispersed and global operations demand flexible applications, and SAP's processes and applications have long been viewed as being strict and not easy to change. Change, however, is a near constant for business users and their processes today, and business applications need to adapt on the fly.

What NetWeaver BPM Is and Is Not

With its NetWeaver BPM announcement, SAP has introduced a "generic business process modeling environment," Sheina says. The big difference between SAP's BPM tool and the pure-play BPM providers' offerings is that SAP's is not (so far) a standalone process management tool that can work in enterprises' heterogeneous IT environments, Sheina points out. "It's really a process management tool that allows SAP users to play around and tinker with their processes that are in place."