Software AG unveils its Digital Business Platform 2.0 at its major customer event in Las Vegas. A year after its launch, the world’s first Digital Business Platform now includes major enhancements to help enterprises and the public sector, plan, govern, design, implement and accelerate their digital projects and strategies. The Digital Business Platform 2.0 includes new assets and technologies to develop and integrate differentiating applications at the speed, and with the flexibility, needed as digitization opens up unprecedented new business opportunities to enterprises fast enough to take them.

“Digitization has relegated ERP to providing back office efficiencies and nothing more”, says Software AG CTO, Dr. Wolfram Jost. “Digitization has turned every company into a software company and every digital strategy decision into a strategic business decision. As a strategic business partner, Software AG drives co-innovation with our customers and partners. We provide the implementation technology in combination with transformation tools and methodologies needed to rapidly digitize. It is combining these with our customers’ innovative business ideas however that ultimately delivers business success.”

In the face of growing digitization, organizations have to reinvent their business and create new business models and designs to remain successful. In combining people, business and things they also have to adapt their IT systems to rapidly changing business conditions. To complete this transformation to a fully digital enterprise requires unprecedented understanding and cooperation between IT and business decision makers, and, co-innovation between customer and software vendor.

Software AG’s Digital Business Platform 2.0 bridges this communication gap from strategic digitization planning to application development and implementation. The Digital Business Platform 2.0 provides:

  • The Digital Journey Overview – a “Digital Roadmap” that enables IT and business management to plan and govern the end-to-end transition process to the digital enterprise
  • A Digital Capability Map – available as a reference model in ARIS, to define and model the requirements for the digital enterprise based on digital capabilities. The digital capability map shows a holistic view on what has to be implemented during the digital transformation process.
  • An IT architecture Planner – ARIS GRC and Alfabet provides a comprehensive view of the changes necessary for digitization from IT architecture, budgetary, legal and regulatory perspectives.
  • A Digital Blueprint – the ARIS Business Process Analysis Platform provides the digital blueprint, the business model impact and the business process needed to address the digital economy.
  • Simplified Application Development – agile, user-friendly applications that are quick to build, even by ‘Citizen Developers’. Software AG’s webMethods Agile Process Platform enables customers to develop agile applications in a way that is adaptable and flexible. This means the agile applications can be incorporated into the strategic IT portfolio and integrated into the existing IT environment without needing to be redeveloped.
  • Enhanced Cloud Offering – webMethods delivers major enhancements for hybrid connectivity, cloud connectivity and advanced orchestration allowing for hybrid cloud deployment. Also included is the new API Cloud offering including the hosting and integration of APIs in the cloud.
  • A Digital Marketplace – Software AG’s Digital Marketplace portal enables enterprises to select and leverage essential IT development components such as solution accelerators, business process models, application components, adapters and industry frameworks as well as fully fledged solutions developed by Software AG’s partners and customers to accelerate time to value.

“Digitization is driving a seismic change in IT development”, continued Jost. “Enterprises that lost IT knowledge and experience through outsourcing or packaged applications must regain them if they are to survive. The IT agility and speed needed to be successful in the digital economy demands the right business ideas, the right development skills set, the right technology and the ability to bring down the barriers between them. This is where the Digital Business Platform becomes the only solution. Enterprises cannot be dependent on software vendors to deliver innovation and digital capabilities “sometime”, but must be able to co-innovate them rapidly and cost effectively at the right time”.

The trend for major enterprises to in-source IT development skills has been apparent in recent years. General Electric (GE), as an example, has invested a billion dollars in establishing a “Software Start-Up” inside the corporation with over a thousand developers and data scientists leveraging and complementing GE’s industrial domain knowledge. GE is now approaching $1 billion in new revenue annually from their expanded software and data activities.

For more information on Software AG’s Digital Business Platform see: Digital Business Platform