SAP Flat in Europe, Grows in U.S.
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The German business software maker SAP (NYSE: SAP) says sales in Europe were flat in the last quarter of 2004, which pushed its shares down in trading. Still, the company met expectations as revenue from software licenses grew 8 percent compared to a year ago.
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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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BANGALORE, INDIA - SAPÂ plans to more than double the number of staff at its software development centers in Bangalore, India, and Shanghai by 2006, and is also considering setting up a new development center in Eastern Europe, according to a company executive.
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Germany's SAP, the world's largest maker of business-management software, reported Thursday a third-quarter rise in revenue and net income, boosted by strong sales in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region and continued growth in the U.S.
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By Anonymous Stora Enso and Neste oil have agreed to join forces to develop technology for producing new-generation biofuels from wood residues. Stage one comprises the construction of a Euro 14 million ($19 million) demonstration plant at Stora Enso's Varkaus mill in Finland.
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It could make about $160 million in the US.
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MANHASSET, NY - Bucking the trend for US based companies to set up new plants and offices offshore, Dell Computer Corp. (Austin, Tx.
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(InfoWorld) - SugarCRM Inc., an open-source customer relationship management (CRM) vendor, has opened a new office in Dublin to help extend its European presence. European governments and business are increasingly interested in open source, the company said, and 25 percent of its commercial customers are in Europe. One-third of its Sugar Open Source downloads -- the free version of its software -- come from Europe, it said. A recent SugarCRM job posting for a regional vice president of sales in Dublin said the company was looking to grow in all market segments, from small to mid-size businesses through large organizations. Its sales strategy is focussed on high volumes of deals with low transaction amounts, ranging from US$2,000 to $250,000, the job posting said. Founded in 2004, the company offers both commercial and free versions of its CRM software. In November, SugarCRM rolled out an open-source stack, called Sugar FastStack, that includes the Apache Web server, the PHP Web scripting language and the MySQL database, along with its own applications. SugarCRM has also worked with Microsoft Corp. to make its SugarCRM Suite run better on Windows Server. Â
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The European market is hot, so the solar technology company plans to expand there.
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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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BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Michigan  - For Americans, there  is no place quite like home. Europeans, however, always seem to  enjoy the challenge of foreign lands.
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Europeâs farmers are beginning to grow crops that can be turned into fuels meant to produce fewer emissions than gas or oil.
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LONDON (CBS.MW) -- SAP has returned to double-digit growth and is continuing to beat its major rivals in worldwide and US market share, the business software leader said on Thursday.
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BARCELONA, Spain  - Europe's biggest software  maker SAP could need a year more than anticipated to reach its  profitability target as it spends on research, development and  marketing, its chief financial officer said on Thursday,  sending its shares lower.
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Blackrock Financial, the specialist US asset manager, has sold the first ever European version of a complex, high-yield commercial real estate investment product that has proved very popular in the US over recent years.
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SAP, the world's leading maker of business software, said it was not concerned by the creation of a new number two in the sector via the merger of rivals Oracle and Peoplesoft in the United States.
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U.S. stock markets were flat in early trading, but European markets recorded significant gains, extending a global stock rally that began Wednesday afternoon.