Upgrades are a fact of life in enterprise IT, but the benefits of SOA make a convincing case for NetWeaver adoption. I like to say, with apologies to Mark Twain, that just as death and taxes are the two certainties of life, so are upgrades in the life of a software application. You can delay death and upgrades, but you cannot completely evade them.
In late 2002, SAP released SAP R/3 Enterprise (Version 4.7). Knowing they would have to upgrade to the latest version someday, many customers went ahead and did just that.
