SAP signs Kagermann through '09
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(InfoWorld) - Henning Kagermann will stay on as CEO of SAP AG through May 2009, the company announced Thursday, ending recent speculation that he would leave the helm of the German software maker. Kagermann turns 60 in July and the company's personnel policy requires that contracts of members of the executive board at and beyond that age be renegotiated with the supervisory board. His upcoming birthday andÂ the need to negotiate his contract had fueled speculation that LÃ©o Apotheker, SAP board member and president of global field operations, and Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group, would take over as a dual-CEO team. Kagermann's career as CEO started in a dual partnership -- from 1998 to 2003 he shared those duties with Hasso Plattner, SAP's board chairman. Kagermann has been part of SAP's executive board since 1991. He started at SAP in 1982. SAP announced Kagermann's contract extension in a three-paragraph statement that included a long comment attributed to Plattner. The board, he said, has expressed its confidence in Kagermann whose guidance has "significantly extended" the company's global reach "while delivering breakthrough innovation." That's a course SAP wants to stay on, Plattner was quoted as saying. SAP, based in Walldorf, Germany, is a market leader in business software applications. Â
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InfoWorld - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions.
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SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies&#39; software will take longer to achieve.SAP agreed to pay $6.8 billion for the business intelligence vendor in October. It has now secured more than 87 percent of Business Objects&#39; shares, more than enough to control the company, CEO Henning Kagermann said at a press conference on Wednesday.Business Objects is now a division of SAP led by its former CEO, John Schwarz. The plan is to integrate its analytics technology more tightly with SAP&#39;s business applications, but also to keep selling standalone products that work with other vendors&#39; software.&quot;While we&#39;ll clearly align ourselves to SAP, we are equally committed to non-SAP customers, platforms and environments,&quot; Schwarz said. &quot;Our intention is to have a business intelligence solution on top of Oracle that&#39;s better than Oracle&#39;s own business intelligence solution.&quot;The companies announced nine software packages that will go on sale this month and combine products from Business Objects and SAP. They include Financial Performance Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Visualization and Reporting.The financial package, for example, includes strategy management and planning tools from SAP and financial consolidation and profit management tools from Business Objects, said Doug Merrit, the head of SAP&#39;s Business User division.Those products were already sold separately, and the packages don&#39;t involve any significant integration work. They are intended to give the companies&#39; sales teams something to go out and sell -- although customers should also see a pricing benefit compared with buying the products separately, Schwarz said.The long-term goal is to integrate the companies&#39; software more tightly to form what Kagermann called a &quot;closed loop.&quot; The idea is that SAP users, acting on information from Business Objects&#39; analytics tools, will be able to more quickly adjust underlying business processes running in SAP Netweaver, Kagermann said.SAP will also offer Business Objects&#39; tools as part of its new suite of on-demand business applications for medium-sized enterprises, called Business ByDesign. The team developing Business ByDesign &quot;will be able to pick the best from the Business Objects portfolio and merge it into Business ByDesign,&quot; Kagermann said.Business Objects already offered its products on demand and had 70,000 subscribers at the time of the acquisition, Schwarz said. The job of merging the BI tools into Business ByDesign has not yet started, however, he said.Business ByDesign is still very new. SAP aimed to have about 100 customers live on the system by the end of 2007, a modest target, and its goal for 2008 is &quot;to prove that we can build a profitable volume business,&quot; Kagermann said.SAP&#39;s news coincided with the announcement from its biggest rival,&#160;Oracle, that it reached a deal to buy middleware vendor BEA Systems for $8.5 billion.BEA is in a different business from Business Objects, but Oracle&#39;s move to expand itself further through another big acquisition only helps to validate SAP&#39;s decision to acquire Business Objects. It was the biggest deal in SAP&#39;s history and broke the vendor&#39;s tradition of not acquiring large companies.SAP bought Business Objects for its technology, not its customers, Kagermann said Wednesday, although he sounded pleased about the new customers that SAP will gain.&quot;After you eliminate the joint customers, we&#39;ll have by far the largest installed customer base in the world. There will be probably more than 60,000 customers using one of our products,&quot; he said.Asked about the BEA deal, Kagermann seemed reluctant to be drawn away from discussing SAP&#39;s own merger, but he did take a quick jab at his rival.&quot;So far we are competing very successfully in the market,&quot; he said. &quot;I was a bit surprised [by the BEA acquisition] because Oracle has said they are the leading technology company, and now they are acquiring technology, which is interesting to me.&quot;SAP Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker was more outspoken. &quot;He has to pay more and more for less and less,&quot; he said after the press conference, referring to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. BEA is &quot;not really that big,&quot; he said.Kagermann reiterated that SAP&#39;s strategy is to grow its core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically, but it won&#39;t rule out another big acquisition to strengthen the company in a new market.
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SAP on Wednesday introduced a long-delayed line of Web-based business management software for mid-sized companies.
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The German business software maker SAP (NYSE: SAP) says sales in Europe were flat in the last quarter of 2004, which pushed its shares down in trading. Still, the company met expectations as revenue from software licenses grew 8 percent compared to a year ago.
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InfoWorld - Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries.
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German business software vendor SAP AG is rolling out a new version of its SAP Business One software with several functions designed for small and medium-size manufacturers.
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Delivering on a promise made earlier this year, SAP has unveiled the first set of products to help businesses meet their compliance requirements, in addition to announcing a marketing agreement with Cisco Systems.
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(InfoWorld) - In a move to strengthen its portfolio of analytic applications, SAP has agreed to acquire privately held Pilot Software, a maker of strategy management software based in Mountain View, California. SAP intends to integrate Pilot Software's core product, the business analytic application PilotWorks, into its suite of business software products that run on the NetWeaver integration platform, the Walldorf, Germany, company said Tuesday. No financial details were disclosed. In earlier interviews, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said the company would make "fill-in" acquisitions in areas where it needed to "generate innovative add-on products around ... core products." Kagermann said "analytic capabilities are part of end-to-end business processes" and referred to embedded analytics as "the future." The Pilotworks application provides analytic tools for executives to manage goals and initiatives more effectively and bring structure and consistency to regularly scheduled operational review processes.
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Whether it amounts to "corporate espionage" or not (most likely not), the case of Oracle v. SAP may have significant ramifications on how the world's leading information providers guard their information systems. In his company's defense this morning, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann admitted to reporters that, while an SAP division did download some material from Oracle inappropriately, the material was for the division's customers and not for SAP customers or SAP.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to build expectations for its hosted suite of midmarket applications, saying Thursday that it will release the product's official name in September and present some initial customers that have gone live with the service. Known presently by the code nameÂ A1S, the service will be a broad suite of hosted business applications for the midmarket, which SAP defines as companies with under 2,500 employees or less than $1 billion in annual revenue. SAP insists the product will be a first of its kind, addressing all the core needs of a medium-sized business, including sales, financials, and procurement, with a service that can be set up quickly and managed remotely by SAP. "It's not just for sales force support, it's an entire suite," SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said on Thursday, in apparent swipe at established hosted CRM (customer relationship management) player Salesforce.com. The service marks a new business model for SAP, however, and Kagermann was clear about the challenges the company will face inÂ bringing it to marketÂ successfully. "We should have in mind that we have never done a launch like this in our history," he said, during a conference call to discussÂ SAP's quarterly earnings. "It's not a product launch, and you should not compare it to a launch like a new CRM product." SAP will be hosting the applications in its own datacenters to begin with, enlisting partners later on. The vendor is also having to create Web-based sales channels to support a high-volume business and new support centers -- or what Kagermann called "service factories" -- to provide 24-hour telephone support. The rollout will be a phased one, and the service is not expected to be widely available in September. Instead, SAP is working to get some reference customers in production with the software, "to show you this is real and not just a nice demo," Kagermann said. "The next phase is the entire operational set up, which lasts through the end of the year. Then beginning next year we will see how fast we can achieve volume, how fast we can ramp this up," he said. The plan is to offer the service widely to customers in the first quarter of 2008, said SAP spokeswoman Astrid PÃ¶lchen. A1S will be delivered primarily as a service, but SAP will also offer an "appliance" that companies can install on site if they think that will make their data more secure, Kagermann said. "They could cut the line if they want and run it locally," he said. The service will benefit SAP's enterprise clients too, according to Kagermann. "They see an option to have alternative offerings from the same vendor for their small subsidiaries, and they see a huge opportunity to integrate suppliers of a smaller size, or customers of a smaller size, in an automated way, because is service-enabled for B-to-B (business-to-business) communication," he said. SAP will compete with several hosted applications vendors, including Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and even Microsoft, which will start toÂ roll out its Dynamics Live CRM serviceÂ before the end of the year. SAP hasn't said yet exactly how it will deal with the specific industry needs of customers without requiring them to customize A1S, although SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner offered some clues in a speech in May at the Software 2007 conference. "There is a physical separation between the UI [user interface] and the application, to the extent that we can have multiple UIs for the same application," Plattner said. "We found that, in order to cover every industry ... from selling books to selling aircraft, that this is so different that you cannot do it with one front end." "In this new idea, we will have multiple front-ends for very specific user needs," he added.
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SAP has acquired Norweigan software startup iLytix Systems, which makes a reporting and budgeting tool, and will use its technology in a new version of SAP's Business One applications suite that was announced Wednesday.
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German software giant SAP said Tuesday it is proceeding with plans to invest one billion dollars in India by 2012, where it doubled its corporate customers in just one year.
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SAP, the world's leading maker of business software, is planning to grow by 15 percent or more in the United States this year after a disappointing year in 2006, the head of the group's US operations said in a newspaper interview.
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Germany's SAP, the world's largest maker of business-management software, reported Thursday a third-quarter rise in revenue and net income, boosted by strong sales in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and continued growth in the U.S.
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SAP America Inc. won a $35 million contract to replace the US Postal Service&#39;s 25-year-old human resources software. The contract covers $14 million in license and maintenance fees for the MySAP Business Suite
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SAP AG has benefited from the market uncertainty created by the long battle between Oracle Corp. and Peoplesoft Inc. Now that the battle is over, the dominant business applications maker doesn&#39;t see the good times ending.