What is "netweaver"

I recently started a new job. As part of my first assignments I was asked to participate in the "installation of netweaver". and I was puzzled. Very puzzled in fact, because in my mind the first netweavers were released in 2004. And I was certain the company wasn't THAT far behind in their release strategy.

So I googled "netweaver", and I looked at my result list. Apparently, the "what is netweaver" is very high on the list of results. So I summized that many people who do not work with SAP daily, might not know what netweaver is. So to avoid further confusion, I created a powerpoint presentation explaining what netweaver is.

From SAPs perspective it's presented as such:

In this picture, the Application Platform is the ABAP and JAVA stack systems that are usually a part of the business suite systems, the Process Integration is the PI system (more or less), Information Integration is a slew of systems and technologies to present stored data differently, like BI, TREX etc. And the People Integration is all of the "user generated data" technology, like mobility, portal etc.

The original idea from SAP was to create a technology in which you could seamlessly move data between systems, SAP or not. Not unlike what was later released as the XI (now PI) system. But in reality, the entire business suite is today a part of the netweaver concept. Anything newer than 4.7 will be "netweaver enabled".
If you think of the SAP business suite as an office pack, where ERP, SRM etc. are the products (like word excel etc) then netweaver will be the API/ language you use to communicate between the products. External tools can also do this, most frequently you will find people describing .NET and websphere as such tools, but in reality many tools exists that supports the netweaver integration.

It ended up with one of my colleagues handing me the installation guide for the software they were talking about. It was from "Netweaver Application Server Java 7.3".... So the confusion was apparently caused by SAP using one of their buzzwords just a slight bit too much.... Again :D