SAP to speech enable applications
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On Wednesday SAP moved one step closer to voice-enabling its applications by signing a deal with VoiceObjects, a developer of voice application management systems.
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(InfoWorld) - SAPÂ is stepping into uncharted waters with the launch of itsÂ hosted business applications service, codenamed A1S,Â on Wednesday. The move will give it a head start over Microsoft and other rivals, but could also mean SAP learns the hard way that offering hosted ERP on a wide scale is difficult to do. Offering business applications on demand, also called software as a service (SaaS), is not new. But most services, including those from trailblazer Salesforce.com, have focused on customer relationship management or human resources management, only a part of ERP (enterprise resource planning). Those functions are easier to offer as a hosted service, since managing sales and payroll tends to be fairly standard across industries and countries. ERP as a whole is more complex, involving tasks like supply chain management, procurement and accounting, for which requirements and regulations can vary greatly. "It's less standard across industries, but even more importantly across geographies. The regulatory differences are profound even between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg," said Bo Lykkegaard, a research manager with IDC in Denmark. Even the existingÂ leader in hosted ERP, NetSuite, has found it difficult to offer the services widely outside the U.S., according to Lykkegaard. "They've been selling mostly CRM internationally, which is easier to localize because it's mostly a question of currency and sales tax." "Hosted ERP is still nascent, and that's what A1S is largely about. That's what makes the A1S launch today so interesting," he said. SAP executives are giving the first public demonstration of A1S, aimed at midmarket companies with up to about 2,000 employees, in New York on Wednesday. They are also expected to unveil the name for the service and possibly pricing. The software is being tested by a handful of customers now and is likely to be rolled out gradually next year starting in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The complexity of hosting ERP software has prevented Microsoft from announcing plans to offer its Dynamics ERP applications as a service, although its hosted Live CRM software is being released this quarter. "Software as a service makes a lot of sense for CRM, because the offering typically goes in with very little customization -- a sales process is a sales process," Klaus Helge Andersen, corporate vice president for Microsoft Business Solutions, said in a recent interview. "ERP has more deep vertical content, and all the multitenant platforms I know about don't have a customization model that works well for individual customers." SAP is expected to show in New York Wednesday how it gets around this problem. It has touted the benefits of A1S at some length but hasn't shown publicly yet how it works. It has said it will be quick and easy for businesses to set up, with interfaces tailored for industries and users. And it promises to open a new market for ERP for smaller companies wary of its complexity, much as Salesforce.com opened doors for CRM. Lykkegaard has seen A1S and said it is built from the ground up as a hosted service, and that SAP has done much to make it easy to use. Customers can look at the software on the Web and try configuring it before they purchase it, "so what used to be a presales exercise the customer can do for themselves," he said. "Then when you configure a business process it's all model-based, so you choose a business process and the user interface will change correspondingly. It's procedure driven." "They truth will be in the details, and we'll see that when some of these midsize companies start to work with the software," he said. Besides NetSuite, SAP will face competition from many small companies offering hosted ERP in local markets. In addition, Deloitte & Touche has been offering hosted ERP using Microsoft's Dynamics software in some European countries, Lykkegaard said, although Deloitte declined a request to discuss it. The rewards are potentially big. IDC projects revenue from on-demand applications to increase almost 60 percent in 2007, and grow at a compound annual rate of 32 percent over the next five years. In 2006, hosted applications accounted for about 3 percent of all software applications revenue. That will increase to 10 percent by 2011, Lykkegaard said. "Keep in mind that's revenue from licenses and maintenance, not just new software licenses, so it's a very profound impact," he said.
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Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday plans to make available a connector kit that allows users to easily link Microsoft's Office Project Server 2003 with SAP AG's ERP (enterprise resource planning) products.
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Microsoft hopes to boost the adoption of business process management apps by adding support for Business Process Execution Language in Vista.
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Skype has rolled out Mac OS X and Linux versions of its free voice over  Internet product. Both versions include Skype to Skype calling and conference calling for up to five participants, as well as the pre-pay SkypeOut service, which allows users to call any landline or mobile worldwide at local rates.
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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. In February SAP kicked off its software as a service business with a sales force automation solution. In May the company added marketing, and in its third update within the year it is now announcing SAP Service. Liz Herbert, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, said that the SAP CRM solution is now displaying the kind of depth SAP is known for. "SAP added a component for managing products that many on-demand CRM vendors don't have. You can use it as the product master or bring in the product master which is typically found in the ERP system," said Herbert. The new service component includes Service Ticket Management, Rule-based Service Ticket Distribution, and Service Level Monitoring. Also included is a rules-base service-level determination calculator that automates the routing of service tickets based on a customer's service level agreement, said Angela Bandlow, vice president at CRM Solutions Marketing. "It's a tiered service that tracks SLAs based on the customer and the required response time," said Bandlow. One of the key differentiators for the SAP offering, according to both Bandlow and Forrester's Herbert, is its ability to integrate easily with MySAP ERP systems on the back end. Using product information found in the ERP system, a sales person can pull up manufacturing availability and pricing information and deliver a quote in real time online. Bandlow said while this completes the three major components of SAP CRM OnDemand, quarterly updates can be expected with the next update due in December. To date, the solution, like almost all on-demand solutions, is not industry-specific. But Bandlow said the company is looking at that and will respond to customer demand.
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Blog: Skype announced today that its application will come preloaded on select Toshiba laptops.
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IBM plans to announce Monday that it will contribute some of its speech-recognition software to two open-source software groups. The move is a tactical step by IBM to accelerate the development
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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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IBM and Honda have teamed-up and developed a hands-free and natural sounding in-vehicle speech recognization system. This system will be integrated in Honda&#39;s Acura RL 2005 model and will be offered as an optional accessory in Honda Odyssey 2005 model.
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(InfoWorld) - 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. The three new governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) applications, based on SAP's new SOA (service-oriented architecture), offer companies help with repository, process control, and risk management functions, the Walldorf, Germany, company said Wednesday. In May, SAP announced theÂ creation of a new GRC business unitÂ at its Sapphire customer event in Orlando. The unit was set up to develop new technology to help companies meet a growing list of compliance requirements, such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations for pharmaceutical companies, and Basel II regulations for the banking sector. The SAP GRC Repository application documents and maintains GRC information in a single central system, including corporate policies and regulations, and will also store and link risk and control libraries to multiple control frameworks and international regulations. The centralization of GRC information simplifies risk management, increases transparency and cuts costs associated with GRC initiatives, according to SAP. SAP GRC Process Control is designed to automatically aggregate business process risks for the entire company, provide supporting evidence of compliance and pinpoint control violations so that corrective action can be given a priority. The software integrates automated control monitoring for SAP and non-SAP applications. To help customers implement collaborative risk management processes, the SAP GRC Risk Management application provides a thorough analysis of key business risks at multiple levels of the company, across organization entities, business process and IT infrastructure, according to SAP. It is designed to help professional risk managers and company owners identify financial, legal and operational risks, analyze business opportunities in light of these and develop appropriate responses. SAP will sell all three products separately. The repository and process control applications will ship Nov. 30, with the risk management software product to follow in December. In addition, SAP has signed a joint marketing agreement with Cisco that will target GRC business processes and IT control issues across the entire IT infrastructure, including the network and application layers. Under the agreement, targeted at the U.S. and Canada, the companies will collaborate in sales and marketing activities, and provide complementary products that offer new levels of IT management and controls between Cisco's service-oriented network architecture (SONA) and SAP's three new GRC applications. Further information about the products isÂ available here.
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Mobie move With Oracle and SAP going at each other last week, Sybase has updated its Unwired Enterprise strategy to help put more SAP business applications into the field.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - The great thing about SOA is that when you add a service, you instantly increase the potential of any application that can consume that service. Today, Avaya threw a new set of VoIP services into the enterprise SOA mix in the form of its CEBP (Communications Enabled Business Processes) solution. For most enterprises, the benefits of VoIP have been limited to the cost savings of retiring legacy phone systems and the added productivity of a few voice/data applications -- almost exclusively for call centers. CEBP exposes an array of voice communications features as Web services, which can be called upon by any number of applications from IT operations to supply chain management. Avaya sees CEBP as a way for enterprises to optimize business processes and respond swiftly to events. For example, based on certain criteria, a temporary interruption at a manufacturing plant might cause SAP R/3 to ping CEBP, which would send an automated advisory message with a return receipt to the appropriate manager via phone, e-mail, or SMS. In the event of a total meltdown, the Notify & Conference feature could be invoked, initiating voice calls to a preset list of people and dropping them all into an emergency conference call. In other instances, CEBP could merely ensure that composite workflow applications, oft cited as a big payoff of SOA, aren't stopped in their tracks by people who aren't sitting at a computer and can't respond promptly. As Avaya senior vice president Stuart Wells puts it, "by bringing our innovation in advanced and open technologies to business processes, Avaya gives organizations the unique competitive advantage that can only arise with more intelligent communications." One customer, Whirlpool, has been experimenting with a pre-release version of CEBP for more than a year. Brian Murphy, director of e-services in Whirlpool's global development division, has already applied CEBP's array of services to IT processes, shortening response times. "If a system goes down ... that's an issue we want to be able to do something about in minutes, not hours. Straightaway, we want to be in action mode," he said. Avaya is not the first vendor to provide a Web services platform for voice communications capabilities. Last September, BlueNote Networks introduced its SessionSuite SOA Edition, designed to enable developers to embed telephony capabilities in a range of applications. But Avaya's large customer base and professional services group could help jump start the use of voice-based Web services. Whirlpool's Murphy, for one, is looking at expanding the use of CEBP in a number of areas, including supply chain management and manufacturing. "We're taking a strategic look at all parts of our business," he said.
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A new add-on for Office Project Server 2003 includes tools for connecting to HR software from SAP.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.
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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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InfoWorld - Oracle Tuesday announced plans to extend the capability of its system management software to offer monitoring and management for SAP AG applications through a partnership with Nimsoft.