SAP Gears Up for Battle
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The Motley Fool - Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News), certainly likes enemies. Perhaps he reasons combativeness will motivate the troops in the battle for software dominance. And, of course, he did win his long battle with PeopleSoft, which he now owns.
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Business software supplier SAP is offering customers a new service to ensure the security of their SAP systems, the company said on Wednesday.
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SAP, the world's leading maker of business software, may need an extra year to achieve its medium-term profit target of an operating margin of 30 percent, its chief financial officer said.
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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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For the past 18 months, SAP has been knocking on the doors of PeopleSoft customers, extending maintenance and licensing incentives to lure them over. Now that Oracle has acquired PeopleSoft, SAP is pulling out a fresh weapon from its arsenal in the battle to win customers -- new technology.
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Got to circle around those SAP wagons Oracle loves buying companies and it simply can't break/won't break the habit. It's got ambitious growth targets to meet and rivals' market share to take.â¦
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Globalization and technical transitions have not always gone smoothly for SAP, a big German software company.
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Oracle executives took advantage of another strong financial quarter to take potshots at the company's primary applications rival, SAP AG.
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German business software firm SAP AG unveiled new enterprise software aimed at information workers during its TechEd developer conference in Las Vegas.  SAP Enterprise Search goes much "deeper" than ordinary text-based search engine, claimed officials at the Waldorf-based firm.
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The once-troubled software company is putting in place the ingredients for growth.
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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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SAP (NYSE: SAP) has ratcheted up its wooing of PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT) and JD Edwards customers with its acquisition of TomorrowNow, a provider of maintenance and other support for enterprise applications, including PeopleSoft and JD Edwards suites.
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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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By Akweli Parker, The Philadelphia Inquirer  Sep. 21--As shares of Oracle Corp. paced gains on Wall Street yesterday  after a glowing earnings report late Tuesday, rival SAP AG scrambled to douse  incendiary remarks made at its expense by Oracle officials.
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SAP&#160;is pushing ahead with two partnerships that aim to provide customers with better user interface options for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.SAP and Microsoft&#160;plan to announce an upgrade in the coming weeks to their Duet software, version 1.5, which will be generally available early next year, officials at SAP&#39;s Tech Ed conference said this week.At the same time, SAP is stepping up its efforts with Adobe Systems&#160;to let developers liven up SAP interfaces using Adobe&#39;s new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology, for building rich Web applications that run outside of a browser.Both projects, on show at TechEd in Munich, Germany, aim to expand the number of employees who access SAP applications and data. The partnerships are also part of an industrywide trend to bring enterprise software to a wider range of business users.SAP&#39;s standard interfaces are often seen as functional, but not very imaginative or easy to use.&quot;Anything that improves SAP&#39;s interfaces, which are hideous and hard to use, is a good thing,&quot; said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk.Duet allows workers to view &quot;contextual&quot; SAP data that might help them make business decisions from within Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Excel. In the current version, that contextual data is limited to what SAP and Microsoft chose to provide for a given task.&quot;It&#39;s really the information we think people want, based on our experience and best practices,&quot; said Yifat Ferber-Harel, a Duet product manager with SAP.Version 1.5 of the product will include tools that allow developers to choose the contextual data they want to present to end users.For example, a big company might set up a process for approving promotions using Microsoft Outlook. When a senior manager receives an e-mail from a department head suggesting a promotion, a developer will be able to provide related information from SAP&#39;s human-resources software, such as the employee&#39;s sales figures, absentee record or current pay scale.The capability should help to deliver on the original promise of Duet, Ferber-Harel said. &quot;Part of our original vision was to give you the information you need to make decisions, and you can&#39;t make decisions without the right information,&quot; she said.The update will also add more user scenarios, the business cases in which Duet can be used. Today they include areas such as leave management and budget planning.At the same time, SAP is working with Adobe on its&#160;AIR technology, a recent addition to Adobe&#39;s Flex development environment. AIR is seen as a rival to Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer because developers can use it to build applications with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash that can on a the desktop instead of in a Web browser.SAP has just developed its first application based entirely on Flex, called Spend Analytics, for aggregating and analyzing spend data, said Matthias Zeller, a senior Adobe product manager, in a presentation at Tech Ed.Spend Analytics includes a tool called Briefing Book, for capturing snapshots of data that can be shared with other managers. Briefing Book is already unusual for an SAP interface, appearing as an actual book rendered virtually on the screen. The tool is usually viewed in a browser, but Adobe has developed a proof-of-concept version with AIR.Zeller showed how users can drag and drop data-views from Briefing Book onto the desktop for offline use -- something not possible in Internet Explorer. And it lets a user work with spend data in Excel, to create a forecast, for example, and then drag that data into Briefing Book. The AIR interface can&#39;t be synchronized with the data in Excel, however.AIR is available today for the Windows and Mac operating systems and will &quot;very soon&quot; be available for Linux, Zeller said. Spend Analytics is available now to some SAP customers and should be generally available in the first quarter next year.Customers looking at the technologies should consider that AIR is still in beta, while Duet has been in the market since June 2006. That said, Adobe and SAP have been working together on interactive forms for SAP since 2002. IBM&#39;s Lotus Notes group also develops client interfaces for SAP.Microsoft and SAP are increasingly rivalrous in the business applications area, and for that reason SAP may find Adobe an easier partner to work with, Red Monk&#39;s Governor said. (RedMonk does consulting work for SAP and Adobe.) In addition, companies might not always find it easy to bring teams of SAP and Microsoft engineers together, said Alan Rickayzen, an SAP senior product manager.&quot;Culturally, the SAP people are totally different from those in the Microsoft Exchange world,&quot; he told Tech Ed attendees. &quot;You have to bring together two groups of people who would not normally talk to each other.&quot;
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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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SAP's chief software architect talked about one of the company's first on-demand offerings, its software-as-a-service philosophy, search functionalities in enterprise software, Web service standards and more in an interview.