SAP says no big ERP updates 'til 2010
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Thinks modular for NetWeaver There'll be no more big updates for SAP's ERP software until 2010, as SAP entices customers and developers to adopt new products and initiatives for its NetWeaver SOA strategy.â¦
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Oracle has postponed the delivery of a major update to its Collaboration Suite until mid-2005, which will add instant messaging and voice-over-IP capabilities, and offer content management features.
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ERP and CRM suite, including eCommerce, inventory, warehouse, order, customer management, general ledger, MRP, POS. Database independent service-oriented architecture (SOA).   The opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM application suite released version 1.0.0 Preview 6 today. There have been over 500 commits since the release of Preview 6 at the end of September. Significant enhancements include:   * Upgraded Pentaho component to the new 1.6 version * Live documentation is now available from opentaps application pages to the opentaps documentation site at http://www.opentaps.org/docs * Amazon.com product, inventory, and order integration now ready for beta-testing * Google Checkout support  * Support for credit card security code in online store and internal order entry * CRM activity and cases security enhancements: highlighting of new cases and activities and security settings to make activities private * Significantly enhanced Material Resources Planning (MRP)  * Support for third party warehouse inventory, such as those held in backup or supplier warehouses * Support for UPS pickup call tags * Improvements to built-in reporting capabilities, with better support for JasperReports, charting, and Excel files. * Other improvements throughout the application.    As opentaps 1.0.0 is still under active development, all users and developers should use subversion's svn update to stay up to date.     opentaps is an open source Java ERP and CRM system which is compatible with Windows and Linux and all major databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MS SQL Server. opentaps can be downloaded from SourceForge.net at:    http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=145855
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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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TechWeb - Despite soaring interest in software-as-a-service, SAP&#39;s new product is aimed at companies with less than 500 employees.
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TechWeb - Those that know what they're talking about see EII as extending the data warehouse -- not replacing it.
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com November 8, 2004, 4:30 PM PT. This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been enterprise directories for several months, but for many IT managers, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and open source initiatives are on the horizon.
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(InfoWorld) - As Oracle executives patted themselves on the back for their company's reporting another strong financial quarter, they also couldn't resist having a go at prime applications rival SAP. "Oracle had another very strong quarter," Safra Catz, co-president and chief financial officer at Oracle, said Tuesday during a conference call with analysts to discuss the vendor's fiscal 2007Â first-quarter results. "We had our strongest first-quarter license growth in more than five years by gaining market share," she added. Charles Phillips, co-president of Oracle, said the company had won 88 deals going head-to-head with SAP during the quarter, including customer wins with Electrolux, Lockheed Martin, and U.S. Steel. Some of the business is what he termed "winbacks" of business Oracle had previously lost to SAP, including a strategic win at Wal-Mart Stores. In recent months, the bitterÂ competitive back-and-forthÂ between Oracle and SAP has reached a crescendo. Oracle jumped on SAP's July announcement ofÂ lower than expected salesÂ and cited it as proof that the applications vendor's growth had stalled. SAP retorted that the results were a slight blip and not indicative of a major issue with its performance, which it believes remains strong. Larry Ellison, Oracle's chief executive officer, cites two factors that he believes are working in Oracle's favor over SAP: its Java-based middleware and its aggressive focus on getting industry-specific expertise and products through acquisitions. Ellison claimed that Oracle's Fusion middleware is "years ahead" of SAP's NetWeaver integration platform. "NetWeaver is still relatively new and still incomplete," he said. Oracle's so-called "hot pluggable" or component-based Fusion middleware strategy is paying off, Phillips said. Typically, the company sells one or two of its middleware components into a customer account with the hope that over time that customer will expand their use of Oracle's middleware. Turning to applications, Ellison criticized SAP's recent decision toÂ retain the current versionÂ of its enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, mySAP ERP 2005, through 2010 and provide new functionality through regularly issued optional enhancement packages. "SAP has delayed the next release of its applications until 2010," he said. "They'll be two full years behind our Fusion release." Oracle is working on a new suite of enterprise applications, known as Project Fusion, which is due out in 2008. By contrast, SAP executives have positioned the company's move to a more modular approach to product upgrades as being driven by customers' demands to pick and choose functionality. This quarter will be the last time Oracle provides separate database and middleware growth figures, Catz said. In the first quarter, database revenue grew 10 percent, while middleware rose 56 percent. In future, Oracle will adopt the practice of IBM and Microsoft and not break out those sales, she said. Looking to the second quarter, Catz expects Oracle's net income to grow by between 13 percent and 17 percent as revenue increases by 22 to 24 percent. She forecast earnings per share (EPS) of $0.22. Those predictions don't take into account any specific charges likely to occur in the quarter.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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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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(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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The world's leading provider of business software, SAP, said Wednesday it expected sustained growth this year following a 3.0-percent rise in net profit in 2007.
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The year just ending has been a tough one for enterprise vendors of all stripes. It has been particularly challenging for the nascent supply-chain visibility field. Unfortunately, 2005 will bring more challenges and continued slow software sales, predicts Forrester Research's Noha Tohamy.
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SAP AG  on Wednesday  introduced a long-delayed line of Web-based business management  software for mid-sized companies, which is at the heart of a  strategy to accelerate the company's sales and compete in the  Internet software arena where smaller rivals are ahead.
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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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SAP is buying a small Indian software company to help beef up the business process management capabilities in its NetWeaver applications platform.It is purchasing Yasu Technologies, a maker of business rules management software, which helps ensure that business processes automated through software are in compliance with a company&#39;s rules and regulations.SAP characterized the deal, announced at its Tech Ed conference in Munich, Germany, on Wednesday, as a &quot;fill in&quot; acquisition that would bridge a gap in its technologies. The deal is due to close this month and financial terms were not disclosed.Several vendors, including SAP, are providing software tools that allow companies to automate common business processes, such as issuing a purchase order or checking inventory levels, with the goal of making them more efficient.But SAP does not yet offer tools for managing these processes, and buying Yasu will help it to add such BPM (business process management) capabilities to NetWeaver.SAP will begin pilot tests of its first BPM product, code-named Galaxy, in the first quarter of next year. The technology acquired from Yasu will be integrated with Galaxy around the middle of next year, said Klaus Kreplin, SAP&#39;s head of NetWeaver technology.Yasu&#39;s software helps companies to enforce the rules that their business processes must abide by. If a company automates a project approval process, for example, Yasu will send projects under a certain budget to a midlevel manager for approval, and more costly projects to a senior manager.&quot;The nice thing is, you can define rules and make them available as a service that can be integrated with other applications,&quot; Kreplin said.Yasu was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees. Customers include the automaker BMW, according to its Web site.BPM is one of several areas SAP is entering to compete better with its main applications rival, Oracle. SAP will also offer software for building composite applications, called the NetWeaver Composition Environment, and developing hosted applications for smaller companies, called SAP Business ByDesign.The Galaxy software will be integrated with NetWeaver Composition Environment next year. Eventually that, in turn, will be offered as a part of Business ByDesign, Kreplin said, although he wouldn&#39;t say when.Last week SAP said it would&#160;buy business intelligence vendor Business Objects&#160;for S$6.8 billion. A few days later&#160;Oracle offered to buy BEA Systems, whose software competes with SAP&#39;s NetWeaver, for $6.7 billion, but BEA called the offer too low.SAP CEO Henning Kagermann told the Financial Times of London over the weekend that SAP won&#39;t enter a bidding war for BEA, and that its strategy is still to grow its two core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically.But he wouldn&#39;t rule out further big acquisitions in areas where SAP is not already strong. &quot;We are categorically not excluding further big acquisitions,&quot; Kagermann said, according to the Financial Times.The company also continues to snap up smaller companies. SAP has bought more than a dozen vendors in the past three years, according to IDC, including five in 2005, three in 2006, and six so far in 2007, including Yasu and Business Objects. That compares to more than 30 acquisitions for Oracle, a few of which were much larger deals.
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SAP plans to expand its focus on business intelligence (BI) software over the next year.
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When Oracle executives in JanuaryÂ publicly described the vendor's Fusion projectÂ to create a new suite of enterprise applications as halfway done, they were referring to the completion of the smaller middleware piece of the massive multibillion dollar project, according to the man in charge of that undertaking. Much work remains to be done on the larger applications piece of Fusion.