SAP’s Rooftop Marketplace
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010“Rooftop Marketplace” may be an unusual name for an enterprise tool (it’s only a prototype at the moment) but the demo is worth a look. (Link to SAP’s SDN forum; via SAP Web 2.0)
The promise of applications like Rooftop Marketplace is powerful: the ability to string together a collection of widgets, thus letting users (or IT) create a full application workflow.
But to me, the more interesting challenge lies in figuring out the “use case” for such tools. “Application workflow” is an abstract notion. Users don’t think in those terms, of course. However, “Purchase order approval” is a real business scenario. So the implication of having tools like “Rooftop Marketplace” (or indeed any composite application builder) is that IT must help define both the problem and the desired solution differently than they do today.