We would like to thank SAP's executive management team, Shai Agassi, Jim Hagemann Snabe, Peter Kirschbauer, Peter Graf, Archim Heimann, Stefan Schaffer, and Thomas Baur, for their support and sponsorship of this book.

Many thanks to the following individuals who tirelessly reached into their depths of knowledge in their specific areas of expertise and contributed to this book: Amit Chatterjee, Catherine Courreges, Bob Cummings, Ralf Dehos, Frank Eck, Steffi Eger, Stefan Elfner, Claudius Fischer, Markus Fischer, Joachim Foerderer, Amy Funderburk, David Grasso, Matthias Haendly, Christian Hastedt-Marckwardt, Markus Kuppe, Karolin Laicher, Jürgen Lindner, Salvatore Lombardo, David Ludlow, Thomas Mattern, Doris Moellgaard, Gordon Mühl, Angeline Ng, Tatjana Nikolic, Tsafrir Oranski, Boris Otto, Gunther Piller, Klaus Pohl, Michael Rademacher, Ingo Rothley, Janet Salmon, Christof Schmoll, Horst Schnörer, Tim Steinmayr, Jeff Stiles, Jeremiah Stone, Ralf Strassner, Kaj van de Loo, Karin Weis, Jens Weitzel, Harry West, and Jeff Word.

A special mention goes to contributing authors Andreas Frank (for his work on analytics) and Hanif Ismail (for his contribution on composite applications).

We would like to extend our special appreciation to Tesha Harvey, for all her support during the writing of this book: We couldn't have done it without you, Tesha.

We appreciate the hard work and focused effort that was put in by the Wiley project team. Thanks to Katie Feltman for keeping us in line with the tight deadlines and ensuring this book was published.

Finally, this book would not exist without the tireless support and patience of Nancy Stevenson. Thank you, Nancy.