SAP to unveil Web software for smaller companies
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FRANKFURT/BOSTON  - SAP AG  will unveil  on Wednesday a line of business management programs to be  delivered over the Web, becoming the first major software  company to make a big bet on software as a service.
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German business software vendor SAP AG released a new version of its SAP Business One software with several functions designed for small and medium-size manufacturers.
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SAP has a new SaaS suite, which may end up being its biggest competitor.
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SAP is rolling out a new set of Java and business intelligence enhancements to its NetWeaver middleware and integration stack.
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SAP on Wednesday unveiled a service, SAP Security Optimization, that offers automated security-configuration checks for customers&#39; software.
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Company hopes to attract users who will later upgrade to its small business software.
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SAP AG will unveil on  Wednesday a line of business management programs to be  delivered over the Web, becoming the first major software  company to make a big bet on software as a service.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP has christened itsÂ suite of hosted ERP softwareÂ for the midmarket SAP Business ByDesign and said it will be available initially in the U.S. and Germany, with the U.K., France and China to follow soon after. Pricing for the service in the U.S. starts at $149 per user per month for a minimum of 25 users, including services and support, SAP said. Customers also pay $54 per month for each group of five "efficiency users," or casual users who access the software only to fill out expense reports and purchase confirmations, for example. SAP CEO Henning Kagermann presented the first demonstration of the product, formerly known by its code name A1S, at an event in New York Wednesday morning, calling it "the most important announcement I have made in my career." SAP has said it will invest â¬300 million to â¬400 million (about $400 million to $550 million) by the end of 2008 to support the introduction of the service, including a consumer marketing campaign on the Web to alter the perception of SAP as a provider of software for big businesses. SAP Business ByDesign aims to offer the gamut of ERP (enterprise resource planning) capabilities in a service affordable and simple enough for use by businesses with 100 employees to 500 employees, Kagermann said. The capabilities include manufacturing, purchasing, accounting, sales and marketing and human resources. The software is live today at 20 customers in Germany and the U.S., including a small aircraft manufacturer, a manufacturer of air fresheners, a technology consulting company and a company that offers packaging and distribution services to pharmaceutical companies. It still wasn't entirely clear from SAP's statement when the average business will be able to sign up for the service, but a safe bet for most countries appears to be 2008. SAP is "currently engaging with pilot customers" in the U.S. and Germany and "validating" the product with customers in the U.K., France and China, it said in a statement. Next year it will offer the service in additional markets including Australia and India in the Asia-Pacific; Italy, the Netherlands, the Nordic region and Spain in Europe; Canada and Mexico in the Americas; and South Africa. Other countries will follow in 2009. The company has said it hopes to open a new market for ERP among companies that rely today on spreadsheets and other individual programs to run their businesses, and were put off ERP in the past by its price and complexity. Analysts say the challenge will be to offer a product that's easy for companies to configure but which meets the needs of their individual business.
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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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Cisco Systems Inc. is set to offer starting Monday a tool to help small and medium-sized businesses use Microsoft Corp. CRM (customer relationship management) software in combination with a Cisco IP (Internet Protocol) communication system.
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(InfoWorld) - AmberPoint on Tuesday will extend its Web services and SOA management system to SAP's NetWeaver business process platform and services based on the ABAP (Advanced Business Application Program) programming language. Through a Development Cooperation Agreement, AmberPoint SOA Management System will provide performance analysis and debugging in the application development stage, quality assurance during staging, and application-level visibility, said Ed Horst, vice president of marketing at AmberPoint. With SAP getting ready to release application components as Web services, AmberPoint is looking to offer management of SAP-based Web services and visibility into ABAP as well, Horst said. "This [arrangement] provides management for those services and a heterogeneous environment around it," Horst said. Organizations using Web services running on NetWeaver will have out-of-the-box integration capabilities with the AmberPoint management platform. Visibility and control will be provided across heterogeneous application networks, including Java and ABAP Web services on NetWeaver. "The major benefit [of the integration] is SOA has lots of pieces to it and SAP will be large part of the landscape, and our job -- our mandate -- is to provide out-of-the-box management for as much of the SOA environment as possible," Horst said. The company's AmberPoint for SAP package will provide an interface between AmberPoint and SAP. With the AmberPoint deal, SAP gets visibility into the larger SOA environment, said analyst Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. The deal represents a big win for AmberPoint because SAP traditionally never makes deals with little companies, Manes said. SAP likely has been finding AmberPoint in accounts and is getting word from customers, she said. "Custom integration between AmberPoint and NetWeaver will ensure a turnkey SOA management solution for the SAP environment that seamlessly integrates with other SOA environments," Manes said. "I see no downside to this partnership for AmberPoint, SAP, or their respective customers," Manes said. AmberPoint can interface with NetWeaver now; an extension for ABAP is due by the end of 2006. AmberPoint's announcement is being made at the SAP TechEd '06 conference in Las Vegas. SAP officials could not be reached for comment on Monday. InfoWorldEditor-at-Large Eric Knorr contributed to this report
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Companies such as SAP and IBM must break their software packages into smaller units as their corporate clients want to cherry pick them to update systems more frequently, consultancy Gartner said on Monday.
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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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InfoWorld - SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies' software will take longer to achieve.
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InfoWorld - SAP has christened its&#160;suite of hosted ERP software&#160;for the midmarket SAP Business ByDesign and said it will be available initially in the U.S. and Germany, with the U.K., France and China to follow soon after.
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Business Objects took the wraps Monday off the latest version of its Crystal Reports software and released a new bundle aimed at giving smaller businesses an all-in-one package for creating and delivering analytical reports over the Web.
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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.