Bill McDermott is excited about the direction business software vendor is headed. And for someone who has led the company’s U.S. operations to 14 consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth, he has every right to be.In his keynote speech delivered Tuesday to more than 15,000 customers, partners and select employees at the Sapphire user event in Orlando, Fla., the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of SAP Americas gave a few reasons for his excitement: The company has delivered promising new products, such as CRM on-demand, SAP Analytics, and Duet, jointly developed with Microsoft, and it is breaking new ground with its services-based architecture.McDermott referred to Duet as an “absolute breakthrough,” an innovative product that links workers at the Microsoft desktop to enterprise applications from SAP. He called the product a “major differentiator” for how companies could run their business.The new frontier of software isn’t “hardwired solutions,” McDermott declared, but “component-based offerings,” giving customers greater agility to roll out new functions and features much faster. “The industrialization of software is upon us,” he said. “We’re following the path of others before us, like the car industry. Cars became pervasive when parts became standardized.”On that note, McDermott turned his attention to service-oriented architecture technology, or enterprise services architecture, as SAP calls it. Easing users’ concerns of yet another new vendor platform, McDermott referred to the transition as “evolutionary and not disruptive,” a business process innovation that empowers businesses and allows them to “co-invest and co-innovate.”Sapphire runs through Thursday.-John Blau, IDG News ServiceFor related news coverage, read SAP Broadens Customer Base at Sapphire and SAP Stresses Master-Data Management.Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe