SAP expands offshore to cater to growth markets
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BANGALORE, INDIA - SAPÂ plans to more than double the number of staff at its software development centers in Bangalore, India, and Shanghai by 2006, and is also considering setting up a new development center in Eastern Europe, according to a company executive.
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If you're wondering just how big SAP is becoming, IDC's Albert Pang has this nugget for you: "The recent rise of SAP as the leading enterprise applications vendor across multiple customer and product categories has created a booming economy whereby an increasing number of developers and resellers are jockeying for the attention of the market leader and its installed base of more than 41,000 customers," he wrote in a recent IDC report.
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The conference call revealed among other things, the company's initial steps to expand internationally.
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Software maker SAP AG announced Wednesday that it had acquired a Texas-based maintenance firm for PeopleSoft platforms in a move to attract customers from its main competitor, Oracle Corp.
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InfoWorld - In search of new markets and customers, SAP AG is developing a new breed of hosted, on-demand products and looking at ways to make its complex business software easier to use.
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InfoWorld - SAP reported an&#160;8 percent jump in its second-quarter net income on Thursday, helped by a sharp increase in revenue from new software licenses.
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LONDON (CBS.MW) -- SAP has returned to double-digit growth and is continuing to beat its major rivals in worldwide and US market share, the business software leader said on Thursday.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Indiaâs business providing software and services to companies outside its borders will grow a healthy 26 to 29 percent this year, the country's main trade association for that sector said Monday. Revenue from exports of software, services and business process outsourcing (BPO) will reach about $40 billion for the fiscal year that ends next March 31, according to data released Monday by the National Association of Software and Services Company (NASSCOM). Export revenue from these sectorsÂ grew 33 percent to $31.3 billionÂ in the fiscal year to March 31,Â according to data released by the trade body. The strong growth in software and services exports is coming from an improvement in India's competitiveness, and the addition of new services, such as remote infrastructure management, by Indian service providers, Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM told reporters in Bangalore on Monday. The revenue figure also includes exports to their parent companies and clients by Indian subsidiaries of multinational companies such as IBM, Oracle, and Accenture, that are expanding fast in India. Indiaâs overall IT industry grew by 30.7 percent in the year to March 31 to earn revenue of $39.6 billion, with the domestic market also growing by 22 percent to $8.2 billion, NASSCOM said. Many multinational companies including Hewlett-Packard and IBM have bagged outsourcing contracts from Indian companies. The Indian IT industry employed about 1.6 million staff as of March 31, besides about 6 million indirect staff employed in supporting the large offshore software development and BPO operations in India, Karnik said. About 1.2 million people are employed in developing software and running back office processes and call centers for customers abroad. The U.S. continues to be the largest market for Indian exports, accounting for 66 percent of revenue, Karnik said. Indiaâs IT industry is facing high staff attrition and salary increases, but that will not slow down growth, Karnik said. In the short term, NASSCOM, of Delhi, is helping set up finishing schools that will make more Indian graduates employable by the IT and the BPO industry, he said. In the long-term, though, NASSCOM is counting on more investments by government and industry in the education sector, he added. The IT industry in India is also grappling with the strengthening of the Indian Rupee against the US dollar, which pushes down realization in Rupees of revenue earned abroad by Indian companies. In the year to March 31, exports of IT services grew by 35.5 percent to $18 billion, while exports of BPO services grew 33.5 percent to $8.4 billion. Revenue from exports of engineering services, a classification that deals with non-electronic design services, grew by 23 percent to $4.9 billion.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP reported anÂ 8 percent jump in its second-quarter net income on Thursday, helped by a sharp increase in revenue from new software licenses. Net income for the quarter was â¬449 million ($605 million as of June 30, the last day of the period being reported), up from â¬415 million in the second quarter last year. That was equal to earnings of â¬0.37 per share, up from â¬0.34 per share a year earlier. Revenue from new software licenses climbed 18 percent to â¬715 million, from â¬604 million last year. Total revenue, including maintenance fees, support and other services, climbed 10 percent to â¬2.4 billion, up from â¬2.2 billion in the second quarter of 2006. The results were better than some analysts expected and showed that SAP is continuing to add new customers even while its main rival, Oracle, grows its applications business throughÂ acquisitions. For the comparable period, its financial quarter ending May 31,Â Oracle increased revenueÂ from new applications licenses by 13 percent, to $641 million. In SAP's biggest market -- Europe, the Middle East, and Africa -- total revenue was up by 12 percent, to â¬1.27 billion. Growth in the Americas, dragged down by the strong euro against the U.S. dollar, was just 6 percent, to give revenue of â¬853 million. SAP continues to grow fastest in Asia, where revenue climbed 20 percent to â¬304 million. CEO Henning Kagermann called it "an excellent quarter." SAP will continue to invest heavily in new products for the midmarket, he said in a statement. The company is spending â¬300 million to â¬400 million over two years to develop a new suite of on-demand applications, intended to offset slower growth from large enterprises. The results come as SAP continues toÂ battle Oracle in U.S. courtÂ for alleged corporate theft. Oracle charged that SAP's TomorrowNow subsidiary hacked into Oracle's customer support Web site and downloaded software fixes and support materials for Oracle's PeopleSoft and JD Edwards applications. SAP planned to use the materials to offer cut-rate services to Oracle customers, according to Oracle's lawsuit. In its response last month, SAP admitted that TomorrowNow employees had made someÂ "inappropriate" downloadsÂ of Oracle materials. But it played down the extent of the transgressions and said SAP itself did not have access to the materials. A case management conference is set for September. Â
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SAP AG reported an 8 percent jump in its second-quarter net income on Thursday, helped by a sharp increase in revenue from new software licenses.
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Boosted by strong sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and with continued growth in the U.S., SAP AG, the world's largest maker of business management software, posted a third-quarter rise in revenue and net income.
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(InfoWorld) - In search of new markets and customers, SAP AG is developing a new breed of hosted, on-demand products and looking at ways to make its complex business software easier to use. Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, talked about one of the company'sfirst on-demand offerings, its software-as-a-service philosophy, search functionalities in enterprise software, Web service standards and more in an interview. The interview comes ahead ofÂ next week's Cebit trade show where customers will have an opportunity to see a brief 15-minute demonstration of SAP's planned new suite of hosted, on-demand midmarket applications, known internally as A1S. The Walldorf, Germany, vendor hopes to launch the product later this year. IDGNS: What is so different about designing an on-demand product, such as your new CRM offering? Sikka: There are a few things that are fundamentally interesting. One is the better economics you can offer by hosting. This is more a function of how much you can leverage the underlying stack technologies -- the different hardware -- below the application layer. Another aspect is the time to get up and running. This a matter of how closely you can get the software to reflect the way customers do their business. A CRM on-demand solution for an insurance company in the U.S. is very different from a CRM on-demand solution for a company in Thailand. IDGNS: What specifically is so different in the design of an on-demand product? The level of prefiguration, number of functions, ease of use? Sikka: Exactly. What you see in our CRM on-demand offering is a significantly easier product to use through ways such as preconfiguration, fewer functions and taking massive advantage of underlying infrastructure. You'll see us do things that go far beyond Salesforce.com. You'll see us starting to work with some of the "cloud" platforms like Amazon and Google. We haven't yet announced any relationships but you'll start to see us doing things of this sort. IDGNS: What role will the software-as-service model play in SAP software across the board? Sikka: We look at it as another deployment option. When you look at SAP, the breadth of functionalities that we offer across our customers, industries and nationalities is very vast. One size doesn't fit all. We're using a wide variety of deployment options. For a certain class of processes, it is advantageous to offer that software as a service. For other processes, it may be better to offer our software as an on-premise model. IDGNS: Are there any limitations in designing software-as-a-service products? Sikka: You have to look at the trade-off between the ability to customize and share data. IDGNS: Will your vertical applications disappear as you move toward intelligent xApps? Sikka: No. Our xApps augment vertical applications. They give companies the ability to build the last mile; they're more narrowly defined applications that tend to leverage existing applications. IDGNS: What about your proprietary programming language ABAP? Will it fade away soon? Sikka: I want to take this opportunity to demystify something. In the age of the enterprise service-oriented architecture, the whole programming-language debate is a very big red herring. Programming languages are an area of constant innovation. Interestingly, what we find in our world is that applications live a lot longer than programming languages do. For instance, Sabre, the application used for airline reservations, is still written in Cobol, even though the last compiler was written over 20 years ago. IDGNS: So ABAP is here to stay? Sikka: You won't see ABAP going away anytime soon. Why? Because a lot of the application code that our customers use is in ABAP. It has a very, very reliable, high-performance underlying platform that is far better than anything we have seen in the market. You'll see ABAP for a long time, but you'll also see more Java because certain applications are best written in Java. And you'll see us using other languages. We do a lot of work in Microsoft programming models. Our approach toward programming languages is to make the programming language distinction irrelevant. IDGNS: How about enterprise search? Do you have any new developments in the pipeline? Sikka: This is an ongoing development. What you have seen from us so far is early thinking in this area. A lot more is to come. You will see enterprise search evolving around different fronts, such as contextual searching. We own the application so we know who the user is, what the user's role is and what the user is authorized to see. IDGNS: What about the cooperation between Microsoft and SAP? What are next steps with Duet and what are the challenges? Sikka: The challenges are always there when you bring two big companies together, like Microsoft and SAP. We have different development philosophies. Microsoft is much more volume oriented and more consumer focused. But we have a great relationship with them. The Duet product is an example. Over time, you'll see Duet expanding in many interesting ways to cover a much wider set of scenarios. You'll see us bringing it closer to our xApp composition platform, so it will be much easier for customers to add on to it. You'll see us working even more closely with Microsoft moving ahead. IDGNS: What about Muse. Any new developments on the user interface front? Sikka: This is an ongoing effort toward rethinking our UI approach. To understand the overall user experience and direction, you have to step back and look at the context in which customers use SAP applications. This is very broad. There are people who are on the factory floor. There are truck drivers, mobile phone users, notebook users and desktop users. We're reaching out to end-users in whatever context they're in. Duet is example. A lot of work happens inside Microsoft Office. Of course, a big area where SAP users -- whether a payroll clerk or an accounting manager -- spend a lot of time is in front of a SAP screen. We want to expose those users to a rich client. This is what Muse is. IDGNS: How are your efforts moving ahead to create a developer community as passionate as the one driving the development of open-source software? Sikka: Having a passionate developer community is something we're extremely interested in. The SAP ecosystem has been around for a long time. Thousands of companies have developed add-ons and we're encouraging this. Beyond that, we're extremely interested in developing efficiencies. We have distributed labs across the world. We have done a lot of thinking in how to optimize the benefits you get from a distributed, decentralized development network like the one we have. IDGNS: Do different regions bring different expertise to the picture? Sikka: Yes, across the board. We see a lot of Linux expertise in China, a lot of mobile expertise in India and Windows expertise in Israel. I don't want to stereotype areas but you see a natural coalescing of skills in different areas. It makes sense to have development in those areas. Â
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The office furniture maker is producing impressive growth overseas.
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Cast your net offshore if you want to expand your investing horizons.
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SAP AG  on Wednesday  introduced a long-delayed line of Web-based business management  software for mid-sized companies, which is at the heart of a  strategy to accelerate the company's sales and compete in the  Internet software arena where smaller rivals are ahead.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP's launchÂ Wednesday of Business ByDesign, a hosted on-demand offering for mid-market customers, is a significant improvement relative to its other offerings in this space, but simplicity and ease of use still remain elusive to the vendor, an analyst observed. According to Ray Wang, senior analyst for enterprise applications with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, SAP's new offering is complex despite considerable research into the mid-market space. "Key features like easy access to reporting, quick portal construction, and easy integration to Office remain missing." Although SAP is not a newcomer to the mid-market arena and actually leads the space by revenue, customers don't necessarily look to the vendor for ERP products, said Wang. He thinks adopters ofÂ SAP Business ByDemandÂ -- originally codenamed A1S and targeted at companies of 100 to 500 employees -- will likely stem from its existing customer base, but that could change depending on how well the company launches and markets this latest product. SAP is hoping to capture the customer segment not serviced by the two existing products in its mid-market portfolio -- All-in-One http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/16/HNsapallinone_1.html and Business One. http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/07/30/SAP-polishes-Business-One-update_1.html CEO Henning Kagermann called it a "complete solution" designed for "end to end, flexible, adaptable, business processes within the company and beyond the boundaries of a company." The launch he said, comes at a time when globalization and the digital revolution are creating a new world of business, therefore requiring a solution such as this one that simplifies IT, reduces the cost of ownership, and allows customers to grow by exploiting the full potential of future business trends. Business ByDemand, said Kagermann, completes SAP's portfolio of mid-market offerings. Twenty customers went live with the product same day. The product will be available in the U.S. and Germany, with the U.K., China, and France to follow. General availability was not announced. Among the drivers behind SAP's offering, said Wang, is the shift in buying behavior in the mid-market space based on the emergence of easily accessed and deployable tools that don't require IT funds or board approvals. "That's changing the way people are buying software, and with that, it's creating a whole new set of decision makers." Also, if SAP is to tackle this space, it needs to offer a SaaS multi-tenant solution to grant customers long-term ability to cut costs -- something Wang doesn't think the company has accomplished with Business ByDesign. The hosted offering will have moderate success but won't be a "slam dunk" at the moment, predicted Wang, because other vendors, notably NetSuite, offers tools with rich configuration, a good user interface and already has a solid reputation in the space. Other on-demand ERP vendors, like Workday, have offerings designed for Web 2.0 environments, unlike offerings by SAP. Rival mid-market vendor, Microsoft, expressed no concern for SAP's new hosted offering. "While we certainly recognize other vendors as formidable competitors, at the end of the day the SMB spot is our sweet spot. We've been servicing this space for years," said Nancy Teixeira, group manager for Microsoft Dynamics with Microsoft Canada. "We understand that this is a market that other vendors would certainly like to go after as well." In the new year, Microsoft will offer on-demand service as an option for its mid-market customer relationship management products, said Teixeira. Pricing for Business ByDemand, including service and support, starts at $149 per user per month for a minimum of 25 users, and $54 per month for five "efficiency users." The offering will be sold initially through direct sales, and once in full deployment, the expectation is a vast majority of business will be driven by partners, the company said. Computerworld CanadaÂ is an InfoWorld affiliate. Â