SAP Introduces New Portal Solution to Help Companies Reduce TCO on a Global Scale

Leading Global Companies, Including Dow Corning and Lufthansa, Utilize SAP(R) Enterprise Portal to Leverage Existing Investments and Open Standards

WALLDORF, Germany, Nov. 5, 2003 -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the latest release of SAP(R) Enterprise Portal (SAP EP), offering enhanced functionality, improved multi-platform support and localization features that will help customers drive more value from their technology investments. Market-leading companies including Dow Corning and Lufthansa Group (Lufthansa) have deployed the new SAP Enterprise Portal to eliminate traditional barriers to productivity and improve collaboration, while leveraging their existing investments.

SAP's enterprise portal solution runs on Windows and UNIX servers, now supporting Unicode for localization to more than 20 languages including Japanese, Chinese and Korean. SAP Enterprise Portal is a component of SAP NetWeaver(TM), the company's open integration and application platform, and provides customers with a unified view of critical information across disparate applications and IT environments. SAP Enterprise Portal allows companies to easily access business-critical, integrated information from SAP and non-SAP applications, data warehouses, desktop documents, internal and external Web content, as well as collaboration tools.

"Companies today are looking for portal products that drive TCO by providing a rich library of predefined components for integration, and a robust development environment for custom integration," said Gene Phifer, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, Inc. "Leading portals also serve as a platform for innovation and in support of new business processes."

Customer Success

Combining a world-class portal infrastructure, knowledge management and collaboration capabilities with predefined business content, SAP Enterprise Portal is helping innovative companies including Dow Corning and Lufthansa to create even more efficient work environments for their employees around the world.

Dow Corning, a global leader in silicon-based materials and solutions, has deployed SAP EP to facilitate efficient employee workflows and to enable role- based information delivery. SAP EP was chosen to deliver a unified view into enterprise-wide content including key performance indicators and intranet as well as integrated information collected from mySAP(TM) Human Resources, SAP(R) Business Information Warehouse and manufacturing applications. With the portal in place, Dow Corning expects to achieve business growth and efficiencies through the application of real time management processes, and by delivering improved responsiveness to customers. Dow Corning plans to roll out the portal to more than 8,000 employees worldwide, and expand the technology to deliver increased choice and flexibility to customers via Dow Corning Premier (the company's customer extranet).

Lufthansa, one of the world's largest airlines, has deployed the new SAP Enterprise Portal to further improve employee collaboration and reduce costs across its global organization in the midterm. The company is leveraging SAP's portal technology to significantly expand the functionality in its existing intranet portal, eBase. With the new portal technology, eBase offers personalized, role-based access to workgroup-specific information and business processes. With its Intranet, Lufthansa is now able to manage content and streamline business operations with paperless processes. With the new portal from SAP, business applications are supported and their functions can be fully integrated for the first time on an enterprise-wide platform. Already live for more than 25,000 employees worldwide, the new eBase portal will be expanded to serve more than 70,000 employees.

"We chose the new SAP Enterprise Portal as it supports our strategy of digitalizing the work environment at Lufthansa," said Dr. Thomas Endres, CIO, Lufthansa AG. "With the new portal, our employees have access to integrated, actionable intelligence to identify and address business issues faster and more effectively. SAP Enterprise Portal also helps us lower costs as it leverages our existing systems and developments."

Enhanced Portal Infrastructure

The new release of SAP EP provides support for UNIX servers from leading vendors such as IBM, Sun and HP, along with support of the latest Microsoft Windows servers, thereby allowing companies to deploy highly scalable and robust portals across their preferred operating platforms. SAP EP uses the Unicode character set in its localization of the portal interface to support over 20 languages, including most European languages and major Asian languages such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Portal administration has been extended and simplified through an object-based administration model that provides a streamlined interface for delegating access and control over all portal components. By providing a greater level of independence in terms of languages, operating platforms and administrative control, SAP EP enables companies to get more value from their exiting IT investments while lowering their operating and training costs.

Collaboration Across the Enterprise

SAP EP now offers support for collaboration rooms, which are virtual workspaces for teams, workgroups and communities to share ideas, knowledge, documents, calendars and to-do lists. Collaboration rooms can be defined and controlled locally so that workgroup administrators can add and update content, memberships and permissions without tying up IT resources. SAP EP also features real-time collaboration, which provides tightly integrated tools such as instant messaging (IM), online awareness and Web-based application sharing that are securely run within the context of the portal. In addition to the collaboration services in the portal product, SAP EP allows users to work with familiar tools via pre-defined adaptors for hosted conferencing services, such as WebEx, and leading email and calendaring technologies.

Leveraging Knowledge Management

The enhanced knowledge management capabilities of SAP EP turn unstructured information into accessible and usable knowledge, leveraging existing repositories along with current portal content. The new features provide comprehensive content management, cutting-edge data retrieval, advanced categorizing and searching, and alerting and notification. SAP EP optimizes user experiences through a flexible, easily customized interface that allows both administrators and users more control over the way in which information is organized and delivered.

"The new release of SAP Enterprise Portal streamlines the delivery of a comprehensive people integration platform, supporting our customers' needs to access and work with disparate information across the extended enterprise, delegating administration globally throughout the enterprise," said Shai Agassi, member of the executive board, SAP. "Success we had at market-leading companies Dow Corning and Lufthansa demonstrates our execution strength in delivering solutions that leverage customers' existing investments and drive new business efficiencies."

For additional information on SAP EP, please visit http://www.sap.com/solutions/enterpriseportal/ .

About SAP NetWeaver(TM)

SAP NetWeaver is a comprehensive integration and application platform that helps reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by facilitating the integration and alignment of people, information and business processes across organizational and technological boundaries. It is designed to be completely open and interoperate with other platforms, such as Microsoft .NET and IBM WebSphere. SAP NetWeaver is the technical foundation for mySAP(TM) Business Suite and SAP(R) xApps(TM) packaged composite applications and ensures maximum reliability, security and scalability to enable mission-critical business processes for today's adaptive businesses.

About SAP

SAP is the world's leading provider of business software solutions. Through mySAP(TM) Business Suite, people in businesses around the globe are improving relationships with customers and partners, streamlining operations, and achieving significant efficiencies throughout their supply chains. The unique core processes of various industries, from Aerospace to Utilities, are supported effectively by SAP's 23 industry solution portfolios. Today, more than 20,500 customers in over 120 countries run more than 67,500 installations of SAP(R) software. With subsidiaries in over 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." (Additional information at http://www.sap.com )

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