Oracle Enterprise Manager to add support for SAP
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It's part of Oracle's plan to focus on making enterprise management one of its core product offerings not just for Oracle environments, but across multivendor IT systems.
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Taking a page from major enterprise software providers like Oracle and SAP, Microsoft announced this week Business Ready Customer Care, an initiative that includes major enhancements to its maintenance and support program for Microsoft Dynamics, ERP and CRM, applications.
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SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies&#39; software will take longer to achieve.SAP agreed to pay $6.8 billion for the business intelligence vendor in October. It has now secured more than 87 percent of Business Objects&#39; shares, more than enough to control the company, CEO Henning Kagermann said at a press conference on Wednesday.Business Objects is now a division of SAP led by its former CEO, John Schwarz. The plan is to integrate its analytics technology more tightly with SAP&#39;s business applications, but also to keep selling standalone products that work with other vendors&#39; software.&quot;While we&#39;ll clearly align ourselves to SAP, we are equally committed to non-SAP customers, platforms and environments,&quot; Schwarz said. &quot;Our intention is to have a business intelligence solution on top of Oracle that&#39;s better than Oracle&#39;s own business intelligence solution.&quot;The companies announced nine software packages that will go on sale this month and combine products from Business Objects and SAP. They include Financial Performance Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Visualization and Reporting.The financial package, for example, includes strategy management and planning tools from SAP and financial consolidation and profit management tools from Business Objects, said Doug Merrit, the head of SAP&#39;s Business User division.Those products were already sold separately, and the packages don&#39;t involve any significant integration work. They are intended to give the companies&#39; sales teams something to go out and sell -- although customers should also see a pricing benefit compared with buying the products separately, Schwarz said.The long-term goal is to integrate the companies&#39; software more tightly to form what Kagermann called a &quot;closed loop.&quot; The idea is that SAP users, acting on information from Business Objects&#39; analytics tools, will be able to more quickly adjust underlying business processes running in SAP Netweaver, Kagermann said.SAP will also offer Business Objects&#39; tools as part of its new suite of on-demand business applications for medium-sized enterprises, called Business ByDesign. The team developing Business ByDesign &quot;will be able to pick the best from the Business Objects portfolio and merge it into Business ByDesign,&quot; Kagermann said.Business Objects already offered its products on demand and had 70,000 subscribers at the time of the acquisition, Schwarz said. The job of merging the BI tools into Business ByDesign has not yet started, however, he said.Business ByDesign is still very new. SAP aimed to have about 100 customers live on the system by the end of 2007, a modest target, and its goal for 2008 is &quot;to prove that we can build a profitable volume business,&quot; Kagermann said.SAP&#39;s news coincided with the announcement from its biggest rival,&#160;Oracle, that it reached a deal to buy middleware vendor BEA Systems for $8.5 billion.BEA is in a different business from Business Objects, but Oracle&#39;s move to expand itself further through another big acquisition only helps to validate SAP&#39;s decision to acquire Business Objects. It was the biggest deal in SAP&#39;s history and broke the vendor&#39;s tradition of not acquiring large companies.SAP bought Business Objects for its technology, not its customers, Kagermann said Wednesday, although he sounded pleased about the new customers that SAP will gain.&quot;After you eliminate the joint customers, we&#39;ll have by far the largest installed customer base in the world. There will be probably more than 60,000 customers using one of our products,&quot; he said.Asked about the BEA deal, Kagermann seemed reluctant to be drawn away from discussing SAP&#39;s own merger, but he did take a quick jab at his rival.&quot;So far we are competing very successfully in the market,&quot; he said. &quot;I was a bit surprised [by the BEA acquisition] because Oracle has said they are the leading technology company, and now they are acquiring technology, which is interesting to me.&quot;SAP Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker was more outspoken. &quot;He has to pay more and more for less and less,&quot; he said after the press conference, referring to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. BEA is &quot;not really that big,&quot; he said.Kagermann reiterated that SAP&#39;s strategy is to grow its core businesses -- applications and middleware -- organically, but it won&#39;t rule out another big acquisition to strengthen the company in a new market.
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InfoWorld - SAN FRANCISCO -- Oracle on Wednesday will introduce Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2, which is being characterized as a significant upgrade to the product with improvements in Java, Web services, and identity management and the addition of RFID backing.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP plans to significantly increase its own use of CA's Introscope application performance management software as well as its customers' access to the technology through an expanded relationship with the systems management and security vendor. The companies announced the first phase of that extended agreement Monday. Users of SAP's Solution Manager 4.0 software will now be able to view the same Introscope monitoring metrics already used by SAP's Active Global Support staff to help remotely diagnose performance and availability issues with their NetWeaver-based applications. NetWeaver is SAP's integration platform and lies at the center of SAP's newer mySAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications. SAP customers will receive an SAP-specific license so that they can access read-only Introscope features tailored for SAP dashboards within Solution Manager. Customers who would like to customize or add in additional Introscope functionality to manage other non-SAP applications can license those capabilities directly from CA's Wily Technology division. "It's a tremendous opportunity for us," Paul Melmon, vice president of CA's Wily. "Every single customer who goes live with NetWeaver has our solution with it." SAP first began licensing Introscope in January 2005 for use by its own engineers to both handle customers' application performance management issues as well as troubleshoot the vendor's internal deployments such as its corporate portal. CA acquired Introscope when itÂ bought Wily TechnologyÂ for $375 million in cash earlier this year. Since the purchase, most of Wily's 260-strong staff joined CA including its executive management team, Melmon said. CA is running Wily as a separate business unit and has committed to keeping in place the vendor's strong relationships with not only SAP, but also BEA Systems, IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems. Melmon didn't have any information regarding the future of the other, non-SAP, agreements. Introscope supports Microsoft's .Net and Sun Microsystems' Java. As well as reconfiguring Introscope for use with SAP NetWeaver-based applications, SAP and CA have been working on a tailored version of the management software for Duet, Marc Thier, vice president, technology support at SAP, said. Formerly known as Project Mendocino, Duet is software jointly developed by Microsoft and SAP to enable users to access data and processes from SAP's back-end business applications via Microsoft's front-end desktop Office software suite. "We will expand the use of Wily for the performance management of all our non-ABAP products," Thier said. ABAP, or advanced business application programming, is SAP's proprietary programming language, and is what the vendor's older products like its R/3 ERP applications are written in. At present, SAP has ABAP performance management data from R/3 and non-ABAP, Java-based performance management data from mySAP applications sitting "side by side" in customers' IT systems, Their said. Come December, SAP hopes to integrate the two kinds of management data into a single user interface using its business intelligence module within Solution Manager to have "end-to-end dashboards," he added. As for how SAP might work with CA as a whole in future, Thier said, "We're very much at the beginning of a relationship with CA; we've nothing to announce at this time."
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(InfoWorld) - When it comes to Oracle Corp.'s on-demand software business, the normally outspoken vendor has tended to be somewhat reticent about how it defines both the scope and focus of its operation. Recently, however, the company has begun to talk more openly about software-as-a-service (SaaS), an approach that it sees as applicable to all Oracle offerings. Earlier this month, Oracle revealed it had more than 2,200 on-demand customers, representingÂ more thanÂ 1.7 million users. In its most recent financial quarter ended Aug. 31, 2006, the vendor reported that its on-demand revenue rose 48.8 percent to $125 million, compared with the year-ago quarter. IDG News Service talked this week to the man who heads up Oracle's on-demand operations, Juergen Rottler, the company's executive vice president of Oracle Customer Services. An edited transcript of that conversation follows. IDGNS: What's Oracle's take on on-demand software? Rottler: There's a lot of interest and hype in the marketplace around on-demand, particularly in the salesforce automation space, whether it's RightNow [Technologies Inc.] or Salesforce.com Inc. or our Siebel CRM On Demand. Oracle is the only company that can offer an overarching on-demand platform for all applications and for all business processes and for different technologies -- database and middleware -- it doesn't have to just be applications. IDGNS: At last month's OpenWorld conference, Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison described the company's on-demand business as the same size as Salesforce.com's; is that correct? Rottler: It's very hard to compare our businesses; it's a bit like an apples-to-oranges comparison. We have so many different deployment options and we don't count software licenses and support as part of on-demand revenue. I'll stick with Larry's statement from OpenWorld. We're a very large company. As a part of Oracle, on-demand isn't a huge business, but we have a very significant interest in it. IDGNS: How does your approach differ from that of, say, SAP AG, which appears to be adopting a more cautious approach to on-demand? Rottler: SAP is struggling in this space. They see it more as an on-ramp as driving users to more traditional [on-premise] software. We've been in the on-demand business for nearly seven years. It's influenced our development priorities, how we run our business and it's influenced our data centers. We really have an on-demand platform. We see partners take that platform for applications across the entire enterprise. We have on-demand versions for all of our applications including the ones we acquired. We've a revamped release of PeopleSoft Enterprise On Demand and we have Oracle On Demand for Siebel CRM as well as Siebel CRM On Demand. We have all our retail 'on-demanded' -- Retek and ProfitLogic -- and our G-Log logistics. We're working on a Portal solution. IDGNS: Who does the bulk of the hosting of your on-demand software -- Oracle or your partners -- in percentage terms? Rottler: In most cases where partners are hosting, it's because the customer already has someone to outsource their software. Depending on the geography, it's in the 20 to 30 percent range. The majority of our business is hosted out of our data centers. IDGNS: Where are your data centers and do you expect to open more outside the U.S. as your on-demand operation grows? Rottler: Our most well-known data center is in Austin, Texas. Our other data centers serve as disaster recovery or back-up sites. We don't talk about them or their location a lot of time for security reasons. For local capabilities, we tend to partner. We're fortunate that we can look at all options, but we'll most likely go with partners. IDGNS: How does your on-demand business look on a regional basis, is it dominated by the U.S.? Rottler: It mirrors the regional themes for broader [IT] outsourcing adoption. North America today is sort of ahead, but Europe is definitely not lagging. It's fast catching up to North America and is led by the U.K. We have a very strong business in Latin America and lots of success in Asia-Pacific anchored in Australia. Our four strongest markets are North America, the U.K., Latin America and Australia. IDGNS: Is there an average size for your on-demand customers? Rottler: It ranges from a few individuals to thousands of users. In general, our on-demand customers and the number of users are growing bigger, quite a bit bigger. We're seeing great interest among Fortune 100 companies. On-demand isn't just for small to midsize businesses. IDGNS: Larry Ellison is an investor in both Salesforce.com and NetSuite Inc. Has it been useful for Oracle to observe what those on-demand companies have been doing? Rottler: Larry's been a believer in this new way of doing business for many years. He's made significant investments in us and in other on-demand companies. We believe this is a market worth developing to create a broader ecosystem. We're also a very important platform provider. Salesforce.com runs on our databases and middleware. They're a customer, NetSuite similarly. We're in competition; in other areas, but they're also customers of ours. We participate in the market in multiple ways. IDGNS: Who do you see as your primary competition both now and in future? Rottler: Ultimately, it will be the same people we compete against today. SAP has been a bit unfocused and haphazard and it'll take them some years to come up to scratch. We're waiting to see if Microsoft [Corp.] can successfully enter the market. The rest of the competition are niche players. The challenge for them is can they broaden their products and be relevant in a broader context? We're a huge company that can provide an individual on-demand service or a multitenant solution securely; others don't have those options. Some players won't be around in future. IDGNS: Oracle has yet to really talk up its on-demand business, is that likely to change? Rottler: You will see us continue to raise the noise level a little. We've had a lot of other Oracle news to cover in the past quarters. On-demand is picking up, there's a lot of activity. IDGNS: What about Oracle's own internal on-demand deployments? Does the company's fondness for eating its own dog food extend to hosted software? Rottler: We look at Oracle as one big on-demand customer. There are many parts of our business running the same platform and products as our on-demand customers.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle is positioning itself to try and attract more SMBs as well as customers that have specific industry requirements and those with particular governance or compliance needs. The highly fragmented SMB market presents opportunities for large and small applications vendors to increase revenue if they can attract customers to adopt their ERP and CRM software. Both Oracle and its main rival, SAP, regularly come out with new initiatives designed to win more SMB hearts and minds. Oracle already believes it has done a lot of work to make it easier for SMBs to install its applications, according to President Charles Phillips. "Our next investment will be around distribution," he said Wednesday atÂ Oracle's launch of new versions of its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel applications. Within the next few weeks, Oracle executives will begin a "world tour for SMBs," stopping in 20 cities and looking to sign up additional partners, Phillips added. Industry-specific applications is "a wide-open area," Phillips said, where many customers have previously used customized software they built themselves. On the industries side, Oracle has established four key business units to meet the needs of retail, communications, financial services, and utilities customers. "It's a new concept for Oracle," Phillips said. Each unit has its own general manager and is responsible for its own profits and losses. Establishing the business units was vital to retaining the key management executives with industry-specific expertiseÂ Oracle gained throughÂ the acquisitions of companies, he added. These include retail software vendor Retek, communications software firm Portal, and most recently, utilities applications provider SPL WorldGroupÂ in November, as well as the 82 percent stake Oracle holds in Indian financial software vendor i-flex Solutions. "It was something of a lessons learned story," John Wookey, senior vice president of applications at Oracle, said in an interview Wednesday. He referred back to the company's experience in 1997 when it acquired Treasury Services, a profitability and risk analysis software provider. When Oracle completed that deal, it moved the Treasury developer team over to Oracle's development operation and mapped all the other Treasury staff including sales and marketing over to the equivalent organizations within Oracle. Over time, while Oracle was able to retain most of the Treasury developers, very few of the skilled sales organization who were educated on the Treasury software remained with the company. "When we did the Retek acquisition, we didnât want to lose that expertise, so we created the retail unit and, most recently, the utilities unit for SPL World," Wookey said. Oracle may look to set up additional industry business units, he added. The vendor already has a public sector group that is separately organized from the general applications sales operations. Another business unit Oracle has recently put in place is a GRC (governance, risk and compliance) organization, Wookey said, which was formed after the vendor acquired enterprise content management vendor Stellent in December. Along with content management, Stellent also provides compliance and records management software and expertise to help customers manage enterprise risk across their entire organizations. The GRC unit will be home to that part of Stellent as well as internal controls software that's featured in E-Business Suite and in PeopleSoft, respectively, Wookey said. In May, Oracle's arch-rivalÂ SAP announced its plans to establish a GRC business unit after acquiring compliance software vendor Virsa Systems. Â
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(InfoWorld) - SAP reacted quickly and angrily to statements made by Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison during his company's quarterly results meeting Tuesday. Ellison's statementsÂ about SAP's product and acquisition strategy are "a complete misrepresentation," said Bill Wohl, SAP's vice president of product and solutions public relations, in a statement. Oracle's CEO said his company's Fusion middleware is "years ahead" of SAP's rival NetWeaver product, and that "NetWeaver is still relatively new and still incomplete." He also said, "SAP has delayed the next release of its applications until 2010," and "They'll be two full years behind our Fusion release." Wohl said "Oracle's next-generation applications exist only in PowerPoint and won't be delivered until 2008 or beyond." He called Oracle statements about both its own products and SAP's "to be inconsistent and misleading." He said that Oracle made conflicting statements about Fusion's development. "In January, Oracle claimed they were halfway to Fusion and two weeks ago they said they wereÂ not even halfway doneÂ -- Oracle needs to adopt one version of the truth, and be honest with the market on its actual progress."
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SAP has decided to support virtual server installations.
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(InfoWorld) - SAP AG unwrapped its Enterprise Search application to help customers conduct specific secure queries of structured and unstructured data held in both SAP and non-SAP software. The vendor announced the search application Tuesday at its TechEd developer conference in Las Vegas during a flurry of announcements promoting innovation and simplicity. "We can do deep searches into enterprise data," Peter Graf, executive vice president of solution marketing for SAP, said during a conference call to discuss the news. "We can leverage all the knowledge we have about a user from [SAP] applications in terms of their preferences, roles and authorization for what information they can see." For instance, an individual within a company could carry out queries around the organization's corporate structure as to who reports to whom or determine which of their peers are experts in technologies like Java, he added. The aim is to make enterprise search tied to business context accessible to nontechnical users for a "Google-like" searching capability, according to Graf. "You don't need a very long learning experience to use Enterprise Search," he said. Formerly known as Project Argo, the application runs on SAP's NetWeaver 2004s integration platform. The underlying indexing engine is SAP's existing Trex search technology combined with newly developed search capabilities. SAP developers can download a free trial version of Enterprise Search now from the company'sÂ SAP Developer Network (SDN) Web site. The company plans to make the application commercially available in 2007, at which point SAP will release pricing details. Developers will be able to adjust Enterprise Search so they can use the application to search non-SAP applications, Graf said. They will also be able to embed search capabilities in other applications and create new search services. Enterprise Search has open interfaces so it can hook into third-party information sources and search engines. SAP plans for Enterprise Search to support a number of different user interfaces. The vendor will make the application available as a browser-based user interface for simple Web search and as a desktop widget embedded in its mySAP ERP 2005 enterprise resource planning application. SAP also intends to offer Enterprise Search as an enhancement to its Business Intelligence Accelerator (BIA) product. Graf stressed that Enterprise Search and BIA are complementary technologies, both using in-memory capabilities and being highly scalable.Â SAP released its BIA analytical engine in May after working closely with Intel Corp., IBM Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. The software enables users to quickly analyze and query vast amounts of business data on the fly without having to pre-aggregate and store the information in a database before querying it. SAP pre-installs BIA on blade servers from HP and IBM. Shai Agassi, president of SAP's product and technology group, described BIA as a "mini-grid and a mini-Google." SAP's main applications rival Oracle Corp. debuted aÂ stand-alone enterprise search product, Oracle Search Enterprise 10g, in March. Other applications players are also looking more seriously at the enterprise search market, including Microsoft Corp. with its Index Server software. Â
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SAP says its mySAP ERP 2005 will be its core platform through 2010. New features will be rolled out in small chunks that are easier to install.
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SAP (NYSE: SAP) has ratcheted up its wooing of PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT) and JD Edwards customers with its acquisition of TomorrowNow, a provider of maintenance and other support for enterprise applications, including PeopleSoft and JD Edwards suites.
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San Francisco, December 7: Oracle Corp on Monday said it believes its business software applications, an area that has lagged the rest of the company, are gaining ground against market leader SAP AG of Germany.
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SAP, the world's leading maker of business software, unveiled a program to woo customers of its rival PeopleSoft wary about future technical and maintenance support for PeopleSoft products now that the company has been taken over by Oracle.
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"Enhancement package" for MySAP ERP includes new human resources and financial management tools, as well as industry-specific add-ons.
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half. Oracle has begun selling business applications software to small companies in conjunction
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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¦