Information as a Strategic Asset

Even in the rare cases where enterprises have managed to unify their transactional systems under a standard SAP umbrella, the solution was rarely sustainable. Mergers and acquisitions frequently and unexpectedly made these houses of cards collapse. Like other suite vendors, SAP was never able to fully displace other applications, including preexisting legacy applications. Most applications are designed to operate with data sources that were specifically created for them. Flexible interchange of data was not part of the original design. In the days when the focus was on accounting applications, there was little need to integrate applications and data.