SAP's Web software to be $149 per user each month
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SAP AG  on Wednesday unveiled  a long-delayed line of Web-based software called Business  ByDesign that costs $149 per user, per month, and is at the  heart of a strategy to accelerate the company's sales growth.
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The General Services Administration plans to charge a one-time fee of $2,500 for vendors and the public to receive a direct, continuous Web feed from the new Federal Procurement Data System.
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SAP said that Pilot Software's core product, the business analytic application PilotWorks, will be integrated into its NetWeaver suite.
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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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The world's leading provider of business software, SAP, said Wednesday it expected sustained growth this year following a 3.0-percent rise in net profit in 2007.
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(InfoWorld) - Fast Search & Transfer ASA has developed an enterprise desktop search tool that retrieves data from users' PCs, as well as from internal servers and the public Web. Fast Search, in Oslo, Norway, will unveil and begin shipping the application on Tuesday at a price of US$25 per seat. Discounts apply on purchases of over 1,000 seats. Fast Personal Search can be used on its own or in conjunction with server-based search platforms from Fast or other vendors. The ideal set-up is with the Fast Enterprise Search Platform, which lets users take advantage of all of its features, a spokesman said. The application is designed to let employees fetch data from multiple sources with a single query. Fast Personal Search also lets users act on files it retrieves. From within its search-results interface, the application lets users open, launch or print found files. It also offers a variety of ways to sort and cluster results. The application comes with security and administration tools to help IT departments configure, deploy and manage it. Fast Search is also making available a software development kit so that its partners can create services and products based on the new product. Matt Brown, a Forrester Research analyst, liked the product's user interface and set of features for end users and IT managers. It's clear that the application will add value to companies that already have Fast Search's server platform, he said. However, he questioned the decision to charge for the product. Considering that desktop search tools tend to be free, he wondered how willing companies will be to pay for it. "I haven't seen companies making huge investments specifically for desktop search," he said. Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. offer free enterprise desktop search tools. X1 Technologies Inc. recently joined them, making its enterprise desktop application, previously priced from $74.95, available free. And Microsoft has aggressive plans to make enterprise search pervasive in its operating systems. "Looking out five years, I'm not bullish that desktop search will live forever as a standalone category," Brown said. In the meantime, beta tester Kevin Madden is excited about Fast Personal Search. He is chief executive officer of Clooster Inc., a startup that makes software to improve the rendering and visualization of results from other desktop search tools. His company has partly integrated its Clooster Desktop with the Fast product and found the process to be simple and straightforward, using the Fast software development kit. Clooster is now completing the integration. "We're excited with its performance and features," Madden said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Computer Associates will offer an on-demand pricing model for many of its mainframe applications. The licensing program uses what CA calls &quot;measured-workload pricing&quot; based on actual system
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Users who sign up before Jan. 31, 2007, will receive a special rate of $14.95 a year and 100 free minutes of international calling.
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Company hopes to attract users who will later upgrade to its small business software.
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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. SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), to be available in March, will enable finance, sales, purchasing, and production departments to collect, analyze, and track all sales and operations-planning data in a central location, thus cutting the time office staff spends compiling and preparing information for directors to make decisions, SAP said Wednesday. The application, the newest member in the SAP xApp family of composite applications, will help companies deal with a common challenge in their sales operations: obtaining a consolidated view of all the sales planning-related data that flows through spreadsheets and applications used by numerous departments, according to Andrew White, research vice president at Gartner. SAP's composite applications, which run on the company's NetWeaver integration middleware, tap reusable functions, or "services," from existing IT systems, automating processes that improve collaboration among business units and business partners, according to SAP With SAP xSOP, each user sees the same sales and operations planning data at the level of detail they need via role-based dashboards, according to SAP. For instance, a detergent maker's sales and marketing directors can use their dashboards to determine the regional campaigns and in-store promotions needed to achieve a monthly million-unit projection. Production managers can use the same projection to determine how much detergent will be powdered, how much will be liquid, and how many tablets to plan for. Integrated key performance indicators will be available in general categories such as demand, supply, inventory, capacity and budget. The indicators can be easily added and altered.
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Computer Associates will install an SAP ERP system to replace a collection of homegrown accounting systems. Accenture will help with the implementation.
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Microsoft is offering a new subscription model to small businesses that will allow them to use the company&#39;s software for less cost than the currently available licensing model.The plan, called Open Value Subscription program, is part of Microsoft&#39;s effort to give small businesses more flexible and affordable options for purchasing software, said Cindy Bates, Microsoft&#39;s general manager for U.S. small business.The new plan costs about a third of the license-only expense for the current licensing program open to small business, called the Open Value program, Bates said. The plan is cheaper because Microsoft offers upfront discounts for software purchased through the subscription program, and also allows customers to increase or decrease pricing over the three-year subscription period if their business needs change, she said.Open Value Subscription includes Microsoft&#39;s Software Assurance program, the company&#39;s software maintenance and support program for business customers.Microsoft defines small businesses as those with 50 employees or fewer. Bates called 50 employees the &quot;break point&quot; for when a company hires IT management. Up until that number, &quot;usually it&#39;s the business owner or office manager&quot; handling the IT system, she said.Businesses will be able to sign up for the Open Value Subscription program beginning in March, Bates said. Microsoft products available through the program include Microsoft Office Small Business, Office Professional +, Windows Vista Business Upgrade, Small Business Server Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL, Desktop Professional Suite, and Small Business Desktop Suite.As part of its small-business outreach, Microsoft also this week is unveiling a partner program called &quot;Big Easy,&quot; which invests about $10 million in subsidies to small businesses purchasing products through partners.Through the program, small businesses purchasing certain products through authorized specialist partners will get a certain percentage of money back that they can use to purchase other services from those partners, Bates said.For example, a small business would get a maximum of 22 percent of the money it spends if it buys six or more products that are on the approved list. Bates said Microsoft has figured the average return will be about 15 percent to 17 percent on purchases for small businesses.Products available for subsidies under the Big Easy program include Microsoft Office products, Exchange Server, Forefront Security for Exchange Server, System Center Essentials, Project, Visio, Office SharePoint Server, Forefront Security for SharePoint, and Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006, among others.More information about Open Value Subscription can be found on Microsoft&#39;s Web site. The company also provides more information about the Big Easy on its Microsoft Small Business Community Blog.
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Blog: The software maker detailed its pricing for the "Live" version of its CRM software, as well as more information on the cut partners will get for selling it.
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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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Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.The support, which starts at $20 per user per year, will be offered to companies that distribute OpenOffice.org, not directly to end-users, according to Mark Herring, senior director of marketing for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Network.com. &quot;For a lot of distributors, they wanted to distribute OpenOffice.org and had no option for back-line support,&quot; he said.OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Sun&#39;s accompanying commercial product, are compatible with Microsoft Office and identical in terms of capabilities, which include word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. But until now, Sun only supported StarOffice.Another difference will remain -- Sun does not plan to provide indemnification against lawsuits for OpenOffice.org, as it does for StarOffice, Herring said.Sun&#39;s move comes as OpenOffice.org is being downloaded 1 million times per week with total downloads to date standing at about 110 million, Herring said.Out of that number, Sun estimates that &quot;tens of millions&quot; of people are actively using the software, according to Herring. The most recent version is 2.3. Version 2.4 is expected in March and will contain significant new features, according to the openoffice.org Web site.&quot;Microsoft Office is still the dominant tool out there -- only a fool would deny that,&quot; he said. &quot;But [OpenOffice.org] has had a huge amount of momentum.&quot;Sun believes the average OpenOffice.org user skews younger on average and that download activity in Europe and the U.S. has been greater than in Asian countries, he added.Developers can create extensions to the core OpenOffice.org suite. Sun has made a new one for shaving down the size of presentation files, Herring said. The wizard-like tool goes through a file and asks users whether they want to keep or compress the various elements, he said.Sun plans to provide support for any extensions it creates, according to Herring. As for ones made by third parties, &quot;we would have to work with them on that code on a case-by-case basis,&quot; he said.Sun is also releasing StarOffice 8 Server. Herring described it as a conversion engine that changes 40 document types into PDF files. The server, which costs $11,000, is aimed at enterprises with large stores of legacy documents that aren&#39;t archived with an open standard, according to Herring.
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Germany plans to introduce a monthly broadcast charge next year for homes and businesses that have an Internet-connected computer and don't already pay registration fees for television and radio service. One business association has called it "a complete rip-off."ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Yahoo is raising the cost of its online subscription music service between $1 and $3 per month, depending on the customer's plan. Initially launched in 2005 at a price of $4.99 per month, Yahoo Music Unlimited will now cost $11.99 per month when purchased annually.