SAP plays tease over mid-market Salesforce 'killer'
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It's different, but better. Oh yes... SAP has doled out a handful of details on A1S, its eagerly anticipated mid-market on-demand suite, while promising to be better than Salesforce.com.â¦
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TechWeb - In an effort to spur sales of its products, Salesforce is launching a program to give third-party software vendors marketing help in exchange for a cut of sales.
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Not the interface you're looking for Salesforce.com's incredible disappearing act will continue next week the announcement of its latest platform and tools initiative to target developers.â¦
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This vendor makes complex, pricey software to forecast call volumes for call centers. And when a customer gets an indecipherable error message in the middle of budget planning, things get crazy.
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Business software maker SAP aims to  win about 1,000 customers for its new Web-delivered software  aimed at smaller companies by the end of 2008, according to  slides due to be presented on Wednesday.
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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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OCTOBER 07, 2004  - Looking to penetrate further into the software infrastructure market, applications vendor SAP AG is rolling out a new set of Java and business intelligence enhancements to its NetWeaver middleware and integration stack.
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Microsoft Corp.  said on  Tuesday it plans to introduce a Web-based version of its sales  and marketing software in 2007 as it targets rivals like  Salesforce.com , Oracle Corp. , and SAP AG   in a fast-growing market.
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Siebel unveiled &quot;Chapter 2&quot; of its CRM strategy this week in an effort to revitalise its sagging fortunes. Siebel has seen declining revenue and fierce competition from high-end rivals such as SAP, as well as from smaller companies such as Salesforce.
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(InfoWorld) - The North American sales arm of Singapore Airlines Ltd. is halfway through a project to use on-demand software from Salesforce.com Inc. to improve collaboration between its home-based corporate travel staff. Following the lead of some of its peers in the industry, Singapore Airlines is requiring corporate business travel sales staff to work out of their homes to pare down infrastructure costs. The sales staff is spread out in cities including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Philadelphia and San Diego. The issue the airline and other companies are grappling with is how best to foster collaboration between such geographically scattered staff while also increasing efficiency and driving more sales. Prior to initial deployment of Salesforce.com's hosted sales automation and marketing software in April, the sales staff relied on e-mail and offline meetings as its main method for communication and collaboration, according to Michael Stellwag, manager of direct sales and marketing for the Americas at Singapore Airlines. About 18 months ago, the airline decided a sales force automation tool could help bring its home-based sales staff into closer collaboration with each other. Singapore Airlines took an in-depth look at products from three vendors over the course of six months -- Sage Software Inc.'s Act contact management software, enterprise applications vendor Saratoga Systems' CRM (customer relationship management) product, and Salesforce.com's hosted sales force automation and marketing offerings. The airline particularly liked Salesforce.com's on-demand approach since the application could run without support from Singapore Airlines' IT staff. The airline closed a deal to use Salesforce software as the software vendor's fiscal year ended on Jan. 31, 2006. From late 2005 through early 2006, Salesforce.com experienced a series of much publicized service outages. "We didn't place too much emphasis [on the failures]," Stellwag said. "Companies like Salesforce.com live and die by availability and we were confident the problem would be fixed. It didn't seem like anything more than a blip on the radar screen." Once the application was up and running, Stellwag began to check out Salesforce.com's AppExchange Web site where the vendor showcases both its own on-demand add-ons and applications developed by third parties to be used with the Salesforce software. "I looked at the broad array of applications and got hooked," he said. Of particular interest have been applications that address the specific needs of the airline industry, according to Stellwag. So far, Singapore Airlines is using 14 AppExchange applications including user adoption dashboards that measure how frequently the sales staff use the software. He also highlighted an application that integrates the Hoover's company database, an important source of sales leads for the airline's staff, with the Salesforce software. Looking ahead, Singapore Airlines wants to find ways to help sales team members be more efficient in how they set up trips to meet customers by doing mash-ups between Salesforce and mapping software from Mapquest Inc. and Google Inc. So far, about a dozen home-based salespeople are using the Salesforce software, with several more individuals to go live shortly. "Longer term, the number of home-based sales team members could jump considerably," Stellwag said. The sales staff particularly like the hosted software's offline module which enables them to access the basic functionality of Salesforce without needing an Internet connection. "People are communicating more than ever before," Stellwag said. "Everyone can see everyone else's details to facilitate greater cooperation and communication and for everyone to see how everyone else is doing." That ability to view colleague's sales progress acts as a self motivator for staff to ensure their efforts are at the level they should be, he added. Sharing calendars and task lists is proving extremely helpful in enabling the airline to put together an account team focused on a particular company, despite the sales team being based in different locations. Soon, the airline will roll out IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes groupware to its sales operation in the U.S. and Canada, which had previously been using Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook Express. Stellwag is looking forward to the integration of Notes with Salesforce to enable further collaboration. "Salesforce has been successful at increasing productivity and has had a significant impact on our sales success," Stellwag said. "This is an experiment being watched very closely by executives in our worldwide headquarters in Singapore." When the project ends in about a year's time, if it has continued to meet a number of preset key performance indicators, the door could be open for a wider deployment of the hosted software. Â
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An SAP initiative to more tightly align its business software with Microsoft's tools is about to bear fruit.
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SAP aims to have 1,000 customers for its hosted midmarket ERP service, Business ByDesign, before the end of the year. It plans to roll out the service in 20 more countries, including India, in that time.&quot;We will go after the biggest markets first,&quot; said deputy CEO Leo Apotheker. &quot;India is a very important market for a product like&#160;Business ByDesign,&quot; he said.The subscription-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) service launched in September, and is now available in the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., and China.SAP will launch the service in new countries each quarter. The Indian launch will happen in the second quarter, according to an SAP spokesman.&quot;For the year, we would like to reach 1,000 customers,&quot; said Apotheker. &quot;That&#39;s enough to show we are a true player in this business.&quot;Apotheker declined to say how many seats the 1,000-customer target represents, noting only that Business ByDesign is aimed at customers with between 100 and 700 employees. Business ByDesign costs $149 per user per month in the U.S., with a minimum of 25 users.Business ByDesign is not the only SAP product for small and mid-size companies: there are also Business All-in-One or, for companies with fewer than 100 employees, Business One. Both run on the customer&#39;s own servers.In some regions, the notion of an ERP &quot;service&quot; can be a hard sell for cultural reasons. &quot;China is a market where the pure on-demand model is still viewed with conservatism,&quot; Apotheker said.&quot;Many people have been worried about the potential for cannibalism, but that isn&#39;t happening,&quot; said Apotheker.&quot;Business All in One is very strong, and Business One had a very good year. We grew the number of customers significantly. There are no issues with cannibalization.&quot;With that confidence that it won&#39;t eat its own market share, SAP plans to offer Business ByDesign to smaller subsidiaries of existing Business ByDesign customers, Apotheker said.
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The Story: With three of the largest competitors in the field taken over by software giants, you?d think that the best days of the business intelligence market were over. You?d be wrong.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    Far from heralding the death of BI, the loss of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion to SAP, IBM and Oracle may well signal ?a golden age for business intelligence,? says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty.Sure, that?s a brave statement. But the BI market has never been as narrow as many people assumed. There are significant players left, including SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, Actuate, and dozens of smaller, often specialized, vendors. ?Go beyond the core tools of reporting and analysis and you?ll see lots of data-mining and statistical tool vendors, as well as industry-specific developers,? says IDC analyst Dan Vesset.The acquisitions of the big guys now creates space for those other companies to flourish, says Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: ?There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.? BI, Tholemeier says, is likely to follow the same course. ?Innovation will come from the outside [companies] as the big guys expand their scale and scope,? concurs AMR?s Hagerty. Pricing, of course, is a major concern as markets consolidate. But because the supply of BI software is still ample, given the large number of independents, buyers still have significant leverage, says Vesset ? though that could change further out, he adds. Moreover, it will take the platform vendors some time to integrate their acquisitions, both in terms of code and business process. And while that process plays out, prices aren?t likely to spike.The Bottom Line: As investor Tholmeier puts it, ?Clearing out the old-timers leaves a huge vacuum for the dozens of innovative players ready to strut their stuff. The business intelligence industry is dead. Long live BI.? That change presents both a challenge for IT to understand the new BI, and the opportunity to drive BI?s benefits to a greater portion of the company.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Executive handbags A slanging match has erupted between Oracle and SAP as the Silicon Valley giant tries to burnish its business apps credectials.â¦
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SAP has unwrapped a new on-demand business software platform targeted at midsize companies (100 to 500 employees) looking to simplify their I.T. requirements while improving the efficiency and flexibility of their business processes.
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Globalization and technical transitions have not always gone smoothly for SAP, a big German software company.
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(InfoWorld) - In a little more than a decade, BEA Systems built itself into a top middleware player and one of the leading lights in SOA. Thatâs a good thing. Revenues at BEA are soaring (up 19 percent in the latest quarter) and the companyâs stock price rose around 50 percent in the last year. But playing in a hot space such as SOA is a classic instance of having the tiger by its tail. As CEO Alfred Chuang told InfoWorld Executive Editor at Large Eric Knorr in a recent interview, the company still needs to move aggressively to avoid being left high and dry by rapid shifts in the technology landscape. InfoWorld: What do you think is the future of enterprise software and where does BEA fits into it? Alfred Chuang: You will have vendors like us that will be selling platforms (and) application vendors that will be selling application components, yet they will be assembled on the fly by an end-user. End-users will be using a tool -- or they will be using templates or processes -- that will represent what their environment is. They can always go back to change the process on the fly, yet the components will continue to be usable within those processes. One big advantage: Youâll be able to upgrade component functionality without affecting the process itself. Today, this is a total mess. IW: Where do you think SaaS (software as a service) will fit in to this vision?                                                     AC: Like when you rent a car, you donât really care much about your car. When people drive a rent-a-car, they drive very differently from when they drive their own car. You see the craziest man driving around the hills of San Francisco in a Ford Taurus -- itâs likely to be me -- and Iâm killing the brakes coming down the streets of San Francisco, flying over the hills, because I donât give a crap. Now, if itâs my own car that Iâm driving, itâs very different. Iâll be parking at the corner parking station and making sure nobody can possibly ding me. There will be people who want full flexibility, so all they want is a rental car. There are people who will want ownership so badly ... that they will buy the software. SaaS will be able to attract small groups in large corporations, or small organizations, period. I think a successful company, including ourselves, even at the middleware layer, will have to offer both to people. IW: So youâre not ruling out offering some of what BEA offers now as a service? AC: Not only am I not ruling it out, we have to do it.Â  Iâm saying itâs not going to be 100 percent of the world. IW: What about the effect of the open source model? AC: Open source is the ultimate tool to keep us honest, especially on pricing. Linux is a good example. I spent the first half of my career from the very beginning of Sun until they were several billion dollars in size. For the longest time, Solaris was the reason people would buy a very, very expensive box. All of a sudden, people did not notice -- especially the people at Sun -- that the API was no longer dependent on Solaris. Weâre not calling any of the functions directly on the operating system anymore. They are programming that to things like J2EE. So overnight, what happened is someone came up with a computer running an operating system that J2EE can run on. Literally, thereâs no porting, thereâs no changing, nothing. In fact, the same application is being extended by buying more CPUs running Linux. Linux totally commoditized Unix in the marketplace. Open source serves [another] very important purpose, I think, which is education. SOA [service-oriented architecture] is lifting us to a different level. Look at the application server or integration software. You really want to educate developers? Let them tinker with whatâs inside so they fully understand what theyâre dealing with. A smart vendor will always watch whether their software is being commoditized. And itâs not wrong to be commoditized as long as your volume catches up with it. You must continue to innovate in abstractions at higher and higher levels. The demand is unlimited at this point in time. Look at our appetite for Internet applications. It is absolutely insatiable. We want more and more and more. I want to do everything on the Internet. If Iâm booking an airline ticket -- I just came back from Asia last night -- I did the whole thing in my car on my 3G BlackBerry.