Introduction to SAP NetWeaver and ECC," NetWeaver is essentially an umbrella term, encompassing a number of SAP products and technologies that combine to create a platform for building, extending, and integrating enterprise applications. The secret behind NetWeaver's successand why it's something you need to pay attention tois its built-in interoperability. With hooks into SAP-, Microsoft-, and Java-based technologies, NetWeaver eases integration with other applications like nothing else. This pays off at a high level in the form of a number of strategic benefits, outlined next.

Strategic Benefits of NetWeaver

SAP implementations based on NetWeaver benefit on several fronts, including

  • Development cost is decreased.

  • Integration is enabled, speeding up time to deploy as well as shrinking the time necessary to perform system upgrades and so on.

  • Total cost of ownership is reduced significantly because maintenance and support costs are dramatically reduced.

  • Thus, innovation is enabled; IT can spend more time meeting the needs of the business, and less time maintaining existing solutions.

SAP NetWeaver changed the enterprise applications playing field when it was introduced, as discussed next.