I can be slow to get involved in round-tables, and the last session was certainly an example of that. Several folks sat down with Peter Graff and Jeff Stiles and talked about the Application landscape that the Enterprise SOA platform will and is creating.
As the conversation evolved, the idea of the ecosystem seemed to be a 'net enabled version of the 90's Microsoft platform monopoly: once you control the lowest level of the system that people care about, you can control the way the ecosystem is monetized. At the moment, ERP 05 is that platform.
Certainly, technologically there's a major difference between 90's Windows and the vision SAP is laying out, but the hole in the model seems the same: the slow, but predictable and reliable growth of open source up the value stack. That is, for folks that deploy the "we control the platform" model, the threat is open source.
For sure, that's essentially a clicé comment now-a-days. But, though there's still millions, and billions of dollars in closed source models, my feel is that the threat of open source applications outside of the infrastructure level is something that most organizations don't take too seriously.
My sense is that xApps is an answer to that, but there's still the tension between "you buy the really valuable stuff from SAP" and "this widget is nifty.
Tomorrow, there's an open source session, so we'll see if we can fill in some holes then.
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