SAP upgrade

SAP makes Business Suite 7 available — should you upgrade?

The newest versions of CRM, SCM, SRM and PLM — all acronyms now flanked with the number 7 — are all available for purchase or upgrade, SAP announced today.

Along with ERP 6.0, they collectively make-up SAP Business Suite 7. Customers on these releases will never have to upgrade in the traditional way again, SAP says.

When Business Suite 7 was announced back in February, SAP was pushing the “value” message.  “We are ready to help our customers get through the current crisis, and Business Suite 7 is designed to do exactly that,” SAP executive Jim Hagemann Snabe said at the time.

Sure, ditching the traditional upgrade process should save customers money. But most ERP customers, and all of the ones running SAP’s other Business Suite apps, have to go through one more upgrade before they can leverage these enhancement packages.

So how can you get there?

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Who’s ready to upgrade now?

Business Suite 7 is supposed to be easier and cheaper to deploy and use, and will give upgrades, “the kiss of death,” as SAP Co-CEO Leo Apotheker put it during yesterday’s press conference.

But most customers have to get past one more “traditional” upgrade before they can leverage Business Suite 7. So one question for the new release is — will it push more customers to upgrade?

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