Three Minutes with SAP Chief on Hosted Apps
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Vishal Sikka, SAP's chief software architect, describes the company's software-as-a-service approach.
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Company exec's post-launch spiel published too soon, it seems
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On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans talks about one of the presenters of the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference and Expo - Ben Ramsey. He asked Ben some questions about the conference and a talk that he'll be giving - "XML & Web Services with PHP (An Overview)".   Ben Ramsey will be speaking on "XML & Web Services with PHP (An Overview)" at the upcoming Zend/PHPConference and Expo. Since I hang out with Ben in the freenode.net #phpc channel I thought it would be cool to talk to him for a bit about his session.   They talk about why Ben is passionate about web services, the two popular protocols for using these services - SOAP and REST, and which one of them Ben prefers.
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In one of his first public acts to address the burgeoning Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) spy scandal, Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd plans to brief reporters Friday about the findings of an analysis conducted by the company's law firm.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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Scott Mattocks, like so many others, has just reciently recieved notification that he's been accepted as a speaker for the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo this fall. He talks more about his speech in his latest post.   My session, "Consusming Web Services with PHP-GTK 2&#8243; will be a look at how to turn a web services API into a desktop application. I only have fifty minutes so it won't be very heavy on implementation details. Instead it will look more at representing different data structures, collecting different types of data and how creating a desktop application can make life easier for the company and the end user.   Scott joins other speakers for this great event, including speakers like Ilia Alshanetsky, Wez Furlong, and Zeev Suraski. Be sure to check back on the Zend site soon to see when Scott and others' talks will be held.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP's planned suite of hosted midmarket applications will be available in select markets later this year. The company will offer more details on pricing and functionality after the Cebit trade show in March, according to CEO Henning Kagermann. Kagermann spoke about the new hosted product, known internally as A1S, with reporters at the company's headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. A1S will target midmarket customers who seek an inexpensive, easy-to-deploy, low-risk suite of business applications including ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management). The on-demand product will be available as a monthly subscription, giving smaller, cost-sensitive companies the flexibility to test the service and drop it if they don't like it. The new offering comes asÂ SAP moves to capture a larger shareÂ of the huge but cost-sensitive segment for midmarket companies that are showing interest in hosted business applications such as those offered by Salesforce.com. Kagermann referred to A1S as an "entirely new product" that will not be a hosted version of the company's All-in-One product. All-in-One is a slimmed down version of mySAP Business Suite, which is designed for large enterprises. The hosted offering will be a highly preconfigured, "off-the-shelf" product that gives companies a range of applications with limited flexibility to tweak their functionality, he said. "To drive the price down, the product must be highly standardized," Kagermann said. The need to offer a set of standardized functions, he said, also means "less choice" of options to customize the product, he added. By narrowly limiting product customization and thus complexity, SAP and its partners will be able to deploy the offering much faster, Kagermann said. Fewer consultants will be necessary, resulting in lower costs. SAP aims to squeeze the new hosted offering between two of its existing products targeting small and medium-size businesses (SMBs): All-in-One and Business One. As part of the company's assault on the global SMB market, A1S will target businesses with between 100 and 1,000 employees, while All-in-One will focus on companies with between 1,000 and 2,500 employees and Business One between 10 and 100. The rollout of the new hosted service will not steal customers from Business One, an inexpensive offering that is also highly preconfigured, Kagermann said. On the contrary, "we expect more than 50,000 of our targeted customer base of 100,000 by 2010 to be Business One customers," he said. For customers that want more functions and greater flexibility to customize the software, All-in-One is the preferred product, Kagermann said. SAP currently has 39,000 customers. Kagermann expects demand for the hosted service to be strongest in the U.S., which is "ahead of Europe" in takeup of on-demand services. Pricing of the service will be highly transparent, he said, but declined to provide details. Nor would he divulge the name of the new service. "We are currently in talks with customers and partners on numerous issues, including pricing and functionality," Kagermann said. "It's too early to talk details just yet."
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Hosted CRM company introduces a new framework for linking analysis tools to its applications.Image: Salesforce dashboard
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Daniel Crook points out the next meeting of the New York PHP Group where Dan Gisolfi will be talking about some of the latest things that IBM has been up to in the mashup arena.   Centered around the concept of "situational applications," IBM's work with mashups targets a growing trend in Web site development. [...] IT specialists should embrace the model as a foothold for PHP in the enterprise.   Some of Dan's presentation is outlined as well - a demo of IBM's Mashup Starter Kit, a look at best practices, and talk on the collaboration of IBM with Zend and ProgrammableWeb. If you're wanting to attend, be sure you RSVP as soon as possible (before the 21st @ 3pm) to reserve your spot.
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A new add-on for Office Project Server 2003 includes tools for connecting to HR software from SAP.
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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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LIVE WEBCAST(Source: BMC Software) What would you do if you could reclaim up to 40% of your development resources? Find out how by attending this Webinar in which Forrester Research presents the findings of new research on application problem resolution.
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(InfoWorld) - Two months after theÂ resignation of Shai Agassi, a driving force behind SAP's product strategy, the German software vendor on Wednesday announced the appointment of its first chief technology officer. Vishal Sikka, formerly senior vice president and chief software architect at SAP, will head the company's newly created Office of the CTO, responsible for ensuring a "clear and harmonized roadmap" for SAP's products, the company said. He will report to CEO Henning Kagermann and be based in the U.S. SAP felt it needed a CTO to oversee some broad changes that are underway at the company, including its renewed focus on the midmarket, the introduction of new on-demand products, and the continued rollout of NetWeaver and its SOA strategy, said SAP spokesman Frank Hartmann. "We thought it was necessary bearing in mind the strong strategic focus of such a role and the responsibilities he is going to bear," Hartmann said. Sikka shouldn't be seen as a replacement for Agassi, whose responsibilities have been divided among several executives who report directly to Kagermann, although part of his job will overlap with Agassi's former duties, Hartmann said. Agassi had been president of SAP's product and technology group and was credited with spearheading its NetWeaver and on-demand strategies. Once tipped as a future SAP CEO, he resigned April 1 after SAP voted to keep Kagermann in that position until 2009. SAP also recentlyÂ lost another senior executive, Aliza Peleg, managing director of SAP Labs in the U.S., who will leave the business applications company by the end of June. It wasn't immediately clear how Sikka's responsibilities as CTO will differ from those of his previous job, where he was responsible for SAP's roadmap and software architecture. Before joining SAP, he was responsible for application development technologies at Peregrine Systems. He holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University and is based in SAP's office in Palo Alto, California.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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TIME sits down with the new talk-show host
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Q&A: Devin Murray, an IT manager at Microsoft, says the software vendor is trying to boost internal server utilization rates so it can stop paying for unused processing power.
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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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The head of the company's on-demand operations explains its position and philosophy.
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Joshua Eichorn notes in a quick post that, due to a last minute change, he will be speaking at php/db|works this year.   He'll be giving two Ajax sessions:  Scaling with Ajax (Wednesday @ 10:15) Javascript Light and Sweet (Wednesday @ 14:45)    Check out the full listing schedule over on the php|architect site for complete details on the whos and whens of each day of the conference. And, of course, you can still sign up for the conference too!