Consolidates, integrates and upgrades apps without coding, according to provider
Redwood City, CA — October 28, 2004 — Business process management company Intalio Inc. has said it is now shipping Intalio|APEX, the company's Application Process Extension solution, which that was previewed earlier this month at SAP TechEd '04 and Gartner Symposium ITxpo.
Designed for Global 2000 companies wanting to maximize their investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM), Intalio said the solution extends the business processes of packaged applications without making any significant changes to the applications themselves.
The solution is available for mySAP Business Suite applications, and Intalio said it consolidates multiple instances of mySAP.com, integrates new mySAP.com modules, or upgrades to mySAP.com or SAP R/3 4.7.
"Enterprise applications are the new legacy — too expensive to maintain, yet too entrenched to displace," said Intalio's president and chief strategy officer, Ismael Ghalimi. "We estimate Intalio|APEX will reduce the cost of development and maintenance of extended SAP business processes by up to 75 percent, while giving SAP users a way to leverage their existing IT assets and improve business agility."
Intalio said SAP customers can use the solution to extend SAP software processes outside of their host applications without writing code. Technical and non-technical SAP users can work with Intalio|APEX to reduce their total cost of ownership of their SAP applications, while accommodating changes to the core business processes that they were originally deployed to support.
Emergence of the APEX Market
According to Intalio, enterprise applications present a challenge to many customers in that, deployed straight out of the box, they may not be able to meet specific company needs. Additionally, customizations may not work with complex business processes that span multiple business objects and applications, and deployments can go over time and over budget. The maintenance associated with customization can also impact the total cost of ownership, sometimes to the tune of 85 percent of an IT budget, Intalio said.
For example, to consolidate multiple mySAP.com instances, a company faces the prospect of re-engineering its business processes to align with those of the application, explained Intalio. The alternative — customizing the mySAP.com master instance — entails ABAP programming that must be carried forward with each SAP upgrade.
The application process extension (APEX) market is emerging in response to this challenge, Intalio said.
When consolidating multiple mySAP.com instances, Intalio said its solution, Intalio|APEX, lets users extend the processes of the master instance to reduce the need for process re-engineering and keep traditional ABAP customization to a minimum.
SAP shops integrating new mySAP.com modules can use Intalio|APEX to automate cross-functional processes to increase the value of new module deployment, while cutting process integration costs. For those upgrading to mySAP.com (or SAP R/3 4.7), Intalio|APEX extends mySAP.com processes to simplify the migration of existing customization and significantly reduce code development.
Intalio|APEX runs on top of SAP Web Application Server, and uses SAP Exchange Infrastructure for connectivity to SAP and non-SAP applications, as well as business partners. Users build processes that include system-to-system, system-to-human and human-to-human transactions. Intalio|APEX coordinates distributed transactions across multiple instances and modules, as well as supports human workflows for SAP and non-SAP users, who are notified of tasks through SAP Enterprise Portal or any email client.
