SAP enhances online sales, service
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SAP AG this week unveiled the third version of its CRM On-Demand online suite with enhancements to its service and sales apps.
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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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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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The US Postal Service has awarded SAP a $35 million contract to supply a new human-resources system. SAP has benefited from a series of big customer wins this year, showing strong revenue growth
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NetSuite has updated the e-commerce piece of its NetSuite hosted application suite, allowing users to manage sales efforts on eBay Inc.'s action site
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E-commerce gets a boost with emerging interactive apps and other new online technology.
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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&#39;s sales and compete in the  Internet software arena where smaller rivals are ahead.
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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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SAP AG  on Wednesday unveiled  a long-delayed line of Web-based software called Business  ByDesign that costs $149 per user, per month, and is at the  heart of a strategy to accelerate the company's sales growth.
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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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DECEMBER 15, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - SAP AG said today that it&#39;s offering customers a new service to ensure the security of SAP systems.
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SAP&#160;is pushing ahead with two partnerships that aim to provide customers with better user interface options for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.SAP and Microsoft&#160;plan to announce an upgrade in the coming weeks to their Duet software, version 1.5, which will be generally available early next year, officials at SAP&#39;s Tech Ed conference said this week.At the same time, SAP is stepping up its efforts with Adobe Systems&#160;to let developers liven up SAP interfaces using Adobe&#39;s new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology, for building rich Web applications that run outside of a browser.Both projects, on show at TechEd in Munich, Germany, aim to expand the number of employees who access SAP applications and data. The partnerships are also part of an industrywide trend to bring enterprise software to a wider range of business users.SAP&#39;s standard interfaces are often seen as functional, but not very imaginative or easy to use.&quot;Anything that improves SAP&#39;s interfaces, which are hideous and hard to use, is a good thing,&quot; said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk.Duet allows workers to view &quot;contextual&quot; SAP data that might help them make business decisions from within Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Excel. In the current version, that contextual data is limited to what SAP and Microsoft chose to provide for a given task.&quot;It&#39;s really the information we think people want, based on our experience and best practices,&quot; said Yifat Ferber-Harel, a Duet product manager with SAP.Version 1.5 of the product will include tools that allow developers to choose the contextual data they want to present to end users.For example, a big company might set up a process for approving promotions using Microsoft Outlook. When a senior manager receives an e-mail from a department head suggesting a promotion, a developer will be able to provide related information from SAP&#39;s human-resources software, such as the employee&#39;s sales figures, absentee record or current pay scale.The capability should help to deliver on the original promise of Duet, Ferber-Harel said. &quot;Part of our original vision was to give you the information you need to make decisions, and you can&#39;t make decisions without the right information,&quot; she said.The update will also add more user scenarios, the business cases in which Duet can be used. Today they include areas such as leave management and budget planning.At the same time, SAP is working with Adobe on its&#160;AIR technology, a recent addition to Adobe&#39;s Flex development environment. AIR is seen as a rival to Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer because developers can use it to build applications with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash that can on a the desktop instead of in a Web browser.SAP has just developed its first application based entirely on Flex, called Spend Analytics, for aggregating and analyzing spend data, said Matthias Zeller, a senior Adobe product manager, in a presentation at Tech Ed.Spend Analytics includes a tool called Briefing Book, for capturing snapshots of data that can be shared with other managers. Briefing Book is already unusual for an SAP interface, appearing as an actual book rendered virtually on the screen. The tool is usually viewed in a browser, but Adobe has developed a proof-of-concept version with AIR.Zeller showed how users can drag and drop data-views from Briefing Book onto the desktop for offline use -- something not possible in Internet Explorer. And it lets a user work with spend data in Excel, to create a forecast, for example, and then drag that data into Briefing Book. The AIR interface can&#39;t be synchronized with the data in Excel, however.AIR is available today for the Windows and Mac operating systems and will &quot;very soon&quot; be available for Linux, Zeller said. Spend Analytics is available now to some SAP customers and should be generally available in the first quarter next year.Customers looking at the technologies should consider that AIR is still in beta, while Duet has been in the market since June 2006. That said, Adobe and SAP have been working together on interactive forms for SAP since 2002. IBM&#39;s Lotus Notes group also develops client interfaces for SAP.Microsoft and SAP are increasingly rivalrous in the business applications area, and for that reason SAP may find Adobe an easier partner to work with, Red Monk&#39;s Governor said. (RedMonk does consulting work for SAP and Adobe.) In addition, companies might not always find it easy to bring teams of SAP and Microsoft engineers together, said Alan Rickayzen, an SAP senior product manager.&quot;Culturally, the SAP people are totally different from those in the Microsoft Exchange world,&quot; he told Tech Ed attendees. &quot;You have to bring together two groups of people who would not normally talk to each other.&quot;
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If you're wondering just how big SAP is becoming, IDC's Albert Pang has this nugget for you: "The recent rise of SAP as the leading enterprise applications vendor across multiple customer and product categories has created a booming economy whereby an increasing number of developers and resellers are jockeying for the attention of the market leader and its installed base of more than 41,000 customers," he wrote in a recent IDC report.
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Beating analysts&#39; expectations and citing strong performance worldwide, SAP released preliminary fourth-quarter financial results on Monday, showing revenue will be about &#8364;3.25 billion ($4.8 billion), a rise of 10 percent compared to the same period last year.Fourth-quarter software and software-related services revenue will be about &#8364;2.48 billion, an increase of about 13 percent year-over-year, according to SAP.Total revenue for 2007 is expected to grow roughly 9 percent to &#8364;10.26 billion. Full-year 2007 software and software-related service revenue is expected to be about &#8364;7.44 billion, a jump of around 13 percent over 2006.Analysts polled by Thomson First Call had predicted on average that total fourth-quarter revenue would come in at $4.7 billion.Exchange rates took a toll on SAP&#39;s results, for as the dollar weakens against the euro, SAP&#39;s U.S. sales are worth less. At constant currency rates, fourth-quarter software and software-related services revenue growth will be about 17 percent year-over-year and total revenue growth will be 13 percent compared to 2006, SAP said.SAP&#39;s results were driven by performance across all regions, but the company showed particular strength in the Asia-Pacific-Japan market, it said. Fourth-quarter software and software-related service revenue rose about 27 percent there to &#8364;.30 billion and is expected to stand at about &#8364;.96 billion for the year, a rise of about 19 percent.SAP estimated fourth-quarter software and software-related service revenue in the EMEA region will be about &#8364;1.40 billion, a jump of roughly 13 percent and &#8364;3.98 billion for the year, which is also about a 13 percent rise.Growth was slower in the Americas, where software and software-related service revenue rose 7 percent in the fourth quarter to &#8364;.78 billion and is expected to be roughly &#8364;2.5 billion for the year overall, a year-to-year increase of 9 percent, according to SAP.However, SAP expects its operating margin to fall slightly for 2007, to 26.5 percent, compared to 27.3 percent in 2006. It attributed the decline to investments made in its Business ByDesign ERP suite targeted at the mid-market.SAP plans to provide more details on its 2007 earnings on Jan. 30.
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EBay changes are designed to boost sales by making the shopping experience easier and safer.
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InfoWorld - Business software vendor SAP has added an offering to its growing suite of quickly deployable applications aimed at helping businesses manage specific tasks across diverse industries.
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(Source: Inquira)  While many organizations have made huge investments in multi-channel customer service application suites, critical gaps still remain in such areas as search, knowledge management, and chat. A new report from Forrester lists the top solutions that help support organizations overcome these gaps and set the stage for significant improvements in service quality.