SAP Gets $35 Million Post Office Pact
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SAP has landed a $35 million deal to help the US Postal Service overhaul its human resources systems. According to sources close to the deal, the agreement includes a $21 million consulting component, and
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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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Computer Sciences Corp. won a $1.35 billion contract to manage phone and computer networks for Ascension Health, the biggest US nonprofit health care system.
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The U.S. Department of Homeland   Security said on Wednesday it awarded $1.35 billion in   contracts to three companies to develop a system to screen for   radioactive matter that might be hidden in cargo.
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Services and software companies IBM  and SAP , longtime technology partners, will bring out their first joint software product in the fourth quarter of this year, the two companies said on Monday.
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Siebel Systems Inc. and Electronic Data Systems Corp. this week will announced a partnership to help companies avoid many of the costs and complexities of managing customer relationship management systems in enterprises.
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SAP America Inc. won a $35 million contract to replace the US Postal Service&#39;s 25-year-old human resources software. The contract covers $14 million in license and maintenance fees for the MySAP Business Suite
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IBM Corp. and plaintiffs challenging the legality of its pension plan agreed to a deal Wednesday that settles most claims and caps the company's potential liability at &#36;1.7 billion. The company previously had estimated that a settlement could cost up to &#36;6.5 billion.
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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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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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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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The Atlantic project will allow users to access SAP's Business Suite through IBM's Lotus Notes.
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Medical supply company PolyMedica Corp. has reached a tentative $35 million settlement with the federal government over alleged Medicare fraud.
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The postal service, which employs more than a third of the civilian employees of the federal government, chose SAP after a multi-year evaluation, it said.
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Medical products supplier PolyMedica Corp. reported Wednesday it reached a tentative settlement with the Justice Department for $35 million over an investigation into Medicare practices.
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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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The U.S. Postal Service is about to get a $35 million Web-based human resources application makeover, based on the mySAP Business Suite from applications vendor SAP AG.