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 Fresh from the eBay keynote at Web Services Edge 2005 in which eBay's Matt Ackley revealed that "SAP is using eBay to sell its excess inventory," SYS-CON Media group publisher Jeremy Geelan had the pleasure of speaking with SAP Evangelist Ivo Totev on SYS-CON.TV (http://www.sys-con.tv) about SAP's outreach to developers.
Totev is based with SAP AG in Europe, so his interview with us was partly courtesy of Lufthansa - he literally had just gotten in to the Hynes Convention Center from Boston's Logan International Airport.
But Totev - who used to work for Sun - was fresh enough to explain the SAP philosophy, which he described in terms of the eternal "Buy vs Build" dilemma: "With SAP customers always had the choice to build either on the SAP platform - the SAP ABAB System - or using open standards. That is how NetWeaver was born in fact."
View Ivo Totev With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV
"But the worlds of 'buy' and 'build' can be brought together, that is what SAP realized," Totev explains. "Taking away the borders, and bringing applications together with technology, using J2EE Web services using pre-built components."
"Our goal is to help customers who are saying to us 'We have a business application here and now we need to add some components in J2EE' and all of a sudden they realize that 'Wow, SAP offers some very cool tools, a complete infrastucture coming with SAP Portal and exchange mechanisms that enable integration, and development tools based on Eclipse, and they say 'well we're an SAP shop anyhow so why not stay in the one environment and use the SAP platform, so there's no need to learn to manage two environments?' There isn't a need for heterogenous environments."
View Ivo Totev With Jeremy Geelan Live on SYS-CON.TV
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