SAP fails to unveil ondemand service
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Swiss-cheese time for A1S SAP has crashed Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce conference with its own event, trumpeting its long-awaited ondemand business applications challenger.â¦
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Small is the new big SAP has released its first incremental update to its application suite under a rewritten roadmap that will not see another major update to its ERP until 2010.â¦
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SAP's Tuesday deadline for interested buyers of its third-party enterprise applications software maintenance and support company TomorrowNow is drawing to a close. Prospective buyers need to move fast if they want a piece of the action.
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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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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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Giving employees, customers and vendors easy-to-use analytics tools that deliver complex reports in real time promises to reshape the business landscape. Learn how SAP deployments running on Dual-core Intel Xeon processor-based blade-server systems provide enterprise-grade business analytics that empower business users and free IT professionals from the chore of running analytics reports.
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When software projects go bad, the results can be disastrous. Every few months, a new horror story pops into the headlines -- like Hewlett-Packard Co.'s recent, flawed SAP deployment. The company had done dozens of smooth ERP (enterprise resource planning) migration projects, but when its latest ran into problems, the cascading disruptions contributed to HP missing its third-quarter financial projections.
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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.
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I'm trying to discover why three out of three of my selected hard-disk recorders refuse to work on my Debian Etch (Demudi) system. Once again I ask myself the relevant questions: Is it me ? Is my computer trying to tell me something ? Is it something I said ? Whatever the reason(s), my reviews of those three programs must remain in limbo until I figure out what's wrong. The applications are all known to run perfectly well on other machines, so I'm sure there's an external problem. When testing new applications one must be prepared with the newest dependencies. CVS sources are often required. Sometimes one must mutter obscure invocations. Alas, I was not sufficiently prepared. Time for a radical shift.
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Apps upgrades will need policies, even if you don't want them Further indications that the coming upgrades of the major business applications such as SAP and Oracle could cause unsuspecting IT managers more problems than they have planned for, first noted here, have come from SOA Software.â¦
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Board promises 'live demo' action After much talk, and with expectations growing, SAP has pledged a long awaited, "comprehensive update" on its planned A1S on-demand applications suite.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - You know the argument: SaaS applications are great for green field deployments, but difficult or risky to integrate with those legacy applications where all the really important data lives. With its announcement this week of ApexConnect, an integration tool to connect on-demand applications to back-end systems, analysts say Salesforce.com has moved to stuff that bogeyman back in the closet and has given SaaS enterprise-level capabilities. The company said Monday that ApexConnect integration services will be built on Salesforceâs Apex programming language for multitenant applications announced last month. The new tool will allow the approximately 400 third-party applications on the companyâs AppExchange platform to work with legacy applications, Web services, and other on-demand applications. Apex uses a syntax that most Java programmers will find familiar and allows any component or application created in it to be shared with any other application on the AppExchange. The new tools include ConnectOut, an outbound messaging API that can orchestrate an event in an external system, such as SAP, based on a trigger event in Saleforce.com, said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce. âIt has the ability to kick off a process with an SAP or Oracle system,â Collins said. Another ApexConnect tool, ConnectOracle, will give IT the capability to connect to any Oracle back office system to synchronize data between Salesforceâs CRM application and Oracleâs ERP systems, Collins said. For example, a new account in Salesforce could be automatically added to Oracleâs billing system or enable a business process such as sending out invoices or delivery notices or matching a new order against a previous discount schedule stored in a contract management system. The Apex API will also allow middleware partners including Tibco, Informatica, Web Methods, IBM and Oracle, to connect to any part of Salesforceâs on- demand system. Taken together, Salesforceâs SaaS platform, AppExchange partners, and ApexConnect show SaaS encroaching on enterprise capabilities and reaching a critical mass that will allow IT to build end-to-end system processes, said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. âOne of the main themes that runs through the history of IT is vendors and companies trying to figure out how to support business processes the way they want to run them from the very beginning to the very end,â Pombriant said. âThis is the end game.â The Apex programming language will be available in the first half of 2007 according to Salesforce officials. â[Systems integrators] have been holding back, [on SaaS] waiting to see what the next big technology shift is going to be. Announcements like this that will help them decide,â Pombriant said.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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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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(InfoWorld) - SAP continued to build expectations for its hosted suite of midmarket applications, saying Thursday that it will release the product's official name in September and present some initial customers that have gone live with the service. Known presently by the code nameÂ A1S, the service will be a broad suite of hosted business applications for the midmarket, which SAP defines as companies with under 2,500 employees or less than $1 billion in annual revenue. SAP insists the product will be a first of its kind, addressing all the core needs of a medium-sized business, including sales, financials, and procurement, with a service that can be set up quickly and managed remotely by SAP. "It's not just for sales force support, it's an entire suite," SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said on Thursday, in apparent swipe at established hosted CRM (customer relationship management) player Salesforce.com. The service marks a new business model for SAP, however, and Kagermann was clear about the challenges the company will face inÂ bringing it to marketÂ successfully. "We should have in mind that we have never done a launch like this in our history," he said, during a conference call to discussÂ SAP's quarterly earnings. "It's not a product launch, and you should not compare it to a launch like a new CRM product." SAP will be hosting the applications in its own datacenters to begin with, enlisting partners later on. The vendor is also having to create Web-based sales channels to support a high-volume business and new support centers -- or what Kagermann called "service factories" -- to provide 24-hour telephone support. The rollout will be a phased one, and the service is not expected to be widely available in September. Instead, SAP is working to get some reference customers in production with the software, "to show you this is real and not just a nice demo," Kagermann said. "The next phase is the entire operational set up, which lasts through the end of the year. Then beginning next year we will see how fast we can achieve volume, how fast we can ramp this up," he said. The plan is to offer the service widely to customers in the first quarter of 2008, said SAP spokeswoman Astrid PÃ¶lchen. A1S will be delivered primarily as a service, but SAP will also offer an "appliance" that companies can install on site if they think that will make their data more secure, Kagermann said. "They could cut the line if they want and run it locally," he said. The service will benefit SAP's enterprise clients too, according to Kagermann. "They see an option to have alternative offerings from the same vendor for their small subsidiaries, and they see a huge opportunity to integrate suppliers of a smaller size, or customers of a smaller size, in an automated way, because is service-enabled for B-to-B (business-to-business) communication," he said. SAP will compete with several hosted applications vendors, including Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and even Microsoft, which will start toÂ roll out its Dynamics Live CRM serviceÂ before the end of the year. SAP hasn't said yet exactly how it will deal with the specific industry needs of customers without requiring them to customize A1S, although SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner offered some clues in a speech in May at the Software 2007 conference. "There is a physical separation between the UI [user interface] and the application, to the extent that we can have multiple UIs for the same application," Plattner said. "We found that, in order to cover every industry ... from selling books to selling aircraft, that this is so different that you cannot do it with one front end." "In this new idea, we will have multiple front-ends for very specific user needs," he added.
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On Christmas day, after the potlatch subsided, I headed out for a run. When I flicked on my MP3 player, however, I heard ... nothing. Glancing down at the display of my Creative Nomad MuVo TX I saw an unwelcome message: "File system error." Grrr.ADVERTISEMENTWhite paper: Solutions to Address IT Control RequirementsLearn how BMC Software Solutions address requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 in this 20 page whitepaper!
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Blog: Critical security flaws patched in EnjoySAP and SAP Web Application Server, as well as more moderate security vulnerability in SAP Message Server, according to advisory issued by Next Generation Security Software (NGSS).
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When Siebel (Nasdaq: SEBL) rolled out version 6 of its OnDemand application earlier this week, it proudly announced that this latest iteration of its hosted offering -- which first became generally available in Q4 2003 -- largely closed the functionality gap with competing vendors, such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Salesnet and RightNow.