SAP to unveil Web-delivered 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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IBM is expected to disclose on Wednesday features of the forthcoming version of its WebSphere application server, which will center on improving performance and administration.
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Software giant will publish advance notice of security bulletins.
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SaaS buddies EMC may partner with German software giant SAP to develop a suite of web hosted storage and application services.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - SAPÂ is stepping into uncharted waters with the launch of itsÂ hosted business applications service, codenamed A1S,Â on Wednesday. The move will give it a head start over Microsoft and other rivals, but could also mean SAP learns the hard way that offering hosted ERP on a wide scale is difficult to do. Offering business applications on demand, also called software as a service (SaaS), is not new. But most services, including those from trailblazer Salesforce.com, have focused on customer relationship management or human resources management, only a part of ERP (enterprise resource planning). Those functions are easier to offer as a hosted service, since managing sales and payroll tends to be fairly standard across industries and countries. ERP as a whole is more complex, involving tasks like supply chain management, procurement and accounting, for which requirements and regulations can vary greatly. "It's less standard across industries, but even more importantly across geographies. The regulatory differences are profound even between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg," said Bo Lykkegaard, a research manager with IDC in Denmark. Even the existingÂ leader in hosted ERP, NetSuite, has found it difficult to offer the services widely outside the U.S., according to Lykkegaard. "They've been selling mostly CRM internationally, which is easier to localize because it's mostly a question of currency and sales tax." "Hosted ERP is still nascent, and that's what A1S is largely about. That's what makes the A1S launch today so interesting," he said. SAP executives are giving the first public demonstration of A1S, aimed at midmarket companies with up to about 2,000 employees, in New York on Wednesday. They are also expected to unveil the name for the service and possibly pricing. The software is being tested by a handful of customers now and is likely to be rolled out gradually next year starting in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The complexity of hosting ERP software has prevented Microsoft from announcing plans to offer its Dynamics ERP applications as a service, although its hosted Live CRM software is being released this quarter. "Software as a service makes a lot of sense for CRM, because the offering typically goes in with very little customization -- a sales process is a sales process," Klaus Helge Andersen, corporate vice president for Microsoft Business Solutions, said in a recent interview. "ERP has more deep vertical content, and all the multitenant platforms I know about don't have a customization model that works well for individual customers." SAP is expected to show in New York Wednesday how it gets around this problem. It has touted the benefits of A1S at some length but hasn't shown publicly yet how it works. It has said it will be quick and easy for businesses to set up, with interfaces tailored for industries and users. And it promises to open a new market for ERP for smaller companies wary of its complexity, much as Salesforce.com opened doors for CRM. Lykkegaard has seen A1S and said it is built from the ground up as a hosted service, and that SAP has done much to make it easy to use. Customers can look at the software on the Web and try configuring it before they purchase it, "so what used to be a presales exercise the customer can do for themselves," he said. "Then when you configure a business process it's all model-based, so you choose a business process and the user interface will change correspondingly. It's procedure driven." "They truth will be in the details, and we'll see that when some of these midsize companies start to work with the software," he said. Besides NetSuite, SAP will face competition from many small companies offering hosted ERP in local markets. In addition, Deloitte & Touche has been offering hosted ERP using Microsoft's Dynamics software in some European countries, Lykkegaard said, although Deloitte declined a request to discuss it. The rewards are potentially big. IDC projects revenue from on-demand applications to increase almost 60 percent in 2007, and grow at a compound annual rate of 32 percent over the next five years. In 2006, hosted applications accounted for about 3 percent of all software applications revenue. That will increase to 10 percent by 2011, Lykkegaard said. "Keep in mind that's revenue from licenses and maintenance, not just new software licenses, so it's a very profound impact," he said.
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SAP today unveiled three compliance products and announced a compliance marketing agreement with Cisco Systems that targets firms in the U.S. and Canada.
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Company seeks to bolster its ability to offer business intelligence applications through a Web browser.
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GT Software next week will formally unveil its platform for outfitting mainframe applications with Web services functionality and linking legacy data into SOAs (service-oriented architectures).
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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 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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Company to unveil plans for generating revenue from its third-party on-demand applications marketplace AppExchange.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP AG is making a major change in the way it delivers ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications to customers, breaking with the traditional approach of upgrading the entire software release every 12 to 18 months. Instead, SAP committed Tuesday to keeping the current version of its ERP software, mySAP ERP 2005, in place through 2010 and providing new functionality via a steady stream of optional enhancement packages. The vendor made the announcement at its TechEd developer conference taking place in Las Vegas this week. SAP determined the new strategy in response to customer demands, according to Peter Graf, executive vice president of solution marketing for SAP. "The customer is in a dilemma," he said. "They want the least distraction to their business possible, while continually innovating in a very short time frame." Not having to upgrade entire SAP ERP applications on a regular basis and being able to choose which functionality to take on via the optional enhancement packages should help ease the pain, Graf added. MySAP 2005 will act as "a stable backbone" on top of which customers can add new functionality from SAP and its partners, Graf said. It's a very different approach from the several hundred product enhancements the vendor showcased in mySAP ERP 2005, he added. The first enhancement package is due to ship in December. It will include new functionality around talent management and financial collaboration, new composite applications, enterprise services, industry-specific capabilities and possible extensions to SAP's NetWeaver integration platform, Graf said. MySAP is based on NetWeaver. Going forward, SAP will likely issue enhancement packages once every quarter or two, with each package grouped around a particular theme. "We'll make sure we deliver them in a very focused way," Graf said. "For example, we'd say this package is all around talent management. If you want it, go for it. If you're not interested, don't use it." Other enhancement packages will includeÂ CRM (customer relationship management)Â andÂ Project Muse, a new GUI (graphical user interface) to mySAP applications developed through a partnership with Adobe Systems Inc.'s Macromedia business unit. SAP begun making mySAP ERP 2005 generally available in May at its Sapphire user conference in Orlando. So far, 200 to 300 customers are live with the latest ERP software version, Graf said, with several thousand other users live on the earlier release, mySAP 2004. SAP is hoping that users on older versions of its software, notably R/3 4.6C and 4.7, will also rapidly move to mySAP ERP 2005. While the message at Sapphire from SAP executives to its users was to adopt mySAP 2005 sooner rather than later, the message from TechEd is rather more blunt. "There's no mySAP ERP 2007. This is it. Move," Graf said. Â
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SAP is offering a new service called SAP Security Optimization, which provides a detailed analysis of security gaps and vulnerabilities and action plans on how to resolve them.
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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 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.
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An SAP initiative to more tightly align its business software with Microsoft's tools is about to bear fruit.