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Technology Stocks : SAP A.G. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Melissa McAuliffe who wrote (2873)	12/23/1998 12:33:00 PM
From: jon iliz	Respond to of 3424

Hi Melissa, In order to be able to use SAP effectively it sounds like a company has to go out and find their own middleware software to accomplish this. Sounds almost like multiple middleware software products if I read it correctly. So in effect you're having to deal with multiple vendors when you run into a problem. Is this correct? Good question Melissa. R/3 is very effective on its own for every customer. What IBM wants to do is extend this into something even more. It must be said that the majority SAP's customers do not have nearly as complex requirements as an IBM giant would have. The first paragraph of the article notes that two of the goals relating to IBM's middleware project are: #2) improving data delivery to users without adversely affecting production computing #4) building the solution — in this case integrating SAP's IDocs, TSI Software's Mercator transformation engine, Tibco's Rendezvous for publish/subscribe delivery and IBM's MQSeries for legacy access. So it looks to me IBM wants to talk to other external applications, off load "other " processing from online users, access/talk to their "legacy" systems. - The bottom line is that "every" ERP vendor will have to deal with these types of complex customers and their own unique requirements. The more complex the customer, the greater the chance they may want/need something else on the side to make life easier. Coming from a non-technical background, I find this whole exchange quite informative and educational. Thanks to everyone who's contributed. Especially Jon and Michelle. I was beginning to think I was wasting my time here. This statement makes me feel much better now. Thank you. Later Alligator, J