ACADEMIA

SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management Celebrates New Peak of Customer and Industry Recognition: In a series of news releases underscoring the business value it is delivering with the SAP NetWeaver platform, SAP AG today announced that the company has solidified its worldwide leadership as the number one product information management vendor (PIM), based on 2005 market share numbers. Gartner Dataquest, a division of Gartner, Inc., the leading provider of research and analysis on global information technology, issued the report "Market Share and Forecast: PIM Software, Worldwide, 2004 - 2010" on September 25, 2006. According to this report, SAP enjoyed a 272 percent year-over-year growth rate, which catapulted the company from its 9 percent market share in 2004 to the number one position in 2005, claiming 19 percent of the worldwide PIM market based on total software revenue. Today, more than 270 customers across all industries worldwide, including Diageo, Ericsson, Nortel and United Stationers, are utilizing SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) to improve a variety of business processes, such as customer acquisition and retention, cross- and up-sell, global spend analysis, workforce management, cataloging and publishing, inventory management, integration of new acquisitions and new product introduction. One example is United Stationers, which selected SAP NetWeaver MDM to improve its product information management. "Before we used SAP NetWeaver MDM, we did not have a singular view of our product information," said Laura Gale, vice president, Content Management and Publication, United Stationers. "Our product content team can now make sure we eliminate data duplication or other errors that could delay our product development and product launches. Going forward, we will have an efficient business process in place that will enable us to introduce products to our customers in days instead of weeks, as well as reduce pre-publication costs significantly. In turn, we can respond to market demands more quickly, ultimately increasing revenues for our customers and ourselves." With the PIM market being a component of the master data management market, SAP attributes the obtained market share leadership position to the increasing adoption of SAP NetWeaver MDM by companies worldwide. SAP NetWeaver MDM enables companies to consolidate their master data to improve internal and external business processes, which is one of the key steps in laying the foundation for a successful adoption of enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). "The market has validated the strategy and vision that we set forward for SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management," said Nimish Mehta, senior vice president, Enterprise Information Management, SAP. "Within less than three years, SAP has evolved from a niche player to the market leader in the PIM market, a major component of the MDM market. With master data management, the core to solidifying the foundation for taking full advantage of enterprise SOA, we believe we are well positioned to expand our leadership in a market that is estimated to grow to US$1.061 billion by 2010, according to Gartner." SAP NetWeaver MDM was launched in September 2003 as a pre-integrated component of the SAP NetWeaver platform -- the market's leading application, integration and composition platform that helps drive innovation, enable business change and facilitate enterprise SOA, the blueprint for service-oriented business solutions. SAP NetWeaver MDM helps companies to improve business processes by utilizing a centralized master data management tool. Companies recognized that data fragmentation within the enterprise causes costly delays through data duplications and errors for business processes, such as time-sensitive product launches, often leading to lost revenue opportunities. SAP NetWeaver MDM enables companies to integrate master data from disparate systems into a central repository. By obtaining a consolidated view, companies can manage, synchronize, distribute and publish data across the enterprise and with trading partners. SAP continues to further enhance SAP NetWeaver MDM. Last month, SAP announced the release of SAP Strategic Data Services for SAP NetWeaver MDM, a unique service to assist customers with data governance, data modeling and other issues around master data as they design their blueprints for enterprise SOA. For more information about SAP NetWeaver MDM, please visit: its Web site.