SAP

What’s next for SAP sustainability?

Last month, SAP was named the highest-ranked software company in the 2009 Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes for the third time. This is good news for SAP, but hardly surprising, given SAP’s focus on sustainability and endorsing a “green” life.

This past May, SAP outlined its sustainability strategy at Sapphire in Orlando. The vendor explained how its approach to ‘going green’ focuses more on the business benefits rather than the environmental benefits alone.

If it’s the business benefits SAP is interested in, things should roll out nicely, at least according to a new report by IDC Manufacturing Insights titled Seeing the Business Benefits of Sustainability: Revenue, Profit and Inventory Management.

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Why the wait for Business ByDesign?

Well, the Business ByDesign news is in from a recent SAP event in London with members of SAP’s SME team and the most interesting thing about it is the lack of any new details - or a ship date - for the service analysts once touted as “most comprehensive SaaS ERP offering on the market.”

SAP is “waiting for more guinea pigs” before releasing its SaaS-based ERP system, BusinessWeek reports and there is “still no ship date” for Business ByDesign, according to InformationWeek.

This is the same thing we’ve been hearing since SAP first announced its ambitious plans to develop and Continued »

Will Rimini Street, and third-party support, be drawn into Oracle’s lawsuit against SAP?

Oracle’s demand for Rimini Street to give it information in its lawsuit against SAP wasn’t the only development in the SAP vs. Oracle saga last week.

Oracle also filed more allegations in the case - filing a fourth amended complaint that attempts to make Siebel and Oracle’s database technology part of the lawsuit.

Oracle now alleges that SAP extended TomorrowNow’s illegal business model to Siebel just days after Oracle completed the acquisition. It also says that TomorrowNow’s environments ran on copies of Oracle database software that weren’t licensed for commercial or production use, according to court documents. SAP refused to purchase Oracle database licenses for TomorrowNow’s use, “even though as an authorized Oracle database reseller, they knew full well the permissible uses of database copies,” the document states.

Oracle certainly hasn’t been shy about piling on the charges in this lawsuit - amending its original complaint four times over the past two years. One now has to wonder what this means for Rimini Street, and whether it will now be dragged into this lawsuit.

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As Oracle’s day in the Sun inches closer, SAP continues to sunblock

This week, Oracle took a step closer to offering the McDonald’s value meal of the tech world - the U.S. Justice Department giving the green light to a deal with Sun that will have Oracle selling “hamburger, fries and a soda” software/hardware packages to companies.

There’s still the matter of the European Union’s OK - which is being held up by concerns over Java, middleware and databases, according to the Wall Street Journal. But the WSJ also reports that the Justice Department’s OK is an encouraging sign that the EU’s approval isn’t far behind.  

Meanwhile, SAP CEO Leo Apotheker has been making it very clear over the past few weeks, in interviews with the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, that SAP has no intention of following the Sun.

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What SAP product or service would make your life easier?

One of the more interesting questions during last week’s “Does IT Matter” forum in Boston came from AMR Research’s Bruce Richardson, who asked the panelists if they had a half an hour with SAP’s North American president Rob Enslin, what product or service would they ask for to make life easier?

Day & Zimmermann’s Anthony Bosco Jr. said he wanted more robust workforce planning capabilities. Raytheon’s Lesley Dickie said she needed a quicker turnaround on product development for her industry.

“I believe we still end up customizing and filling the gaps on our own,” she said.

Thomas Doyle of GT Solar, which manufactures materials used to make solar cells and panels, said he’d like more SaaS applications. It’s a way for his business to achieve a smaller application footprint, he said. He could envision launching applications such as human resources in this manner.

Doyle’s response was perhaps a signal that SAP’s approach to on-demand applications for the big guys may need to trickle down to the smaller ones too. GT Solar is an SAP Business All-in-One customer, SAP’s on-premise ERP for the midmarket.

A few months ago, SAP said it would develop on-demand applications for large enterprises that would integrate with and extend functionality in the on-premise SAP Business Suite.

And in the past few weeks, it’s been pushing SAP Business ByDesign - its SaaS ERP for the midmarket — highlighting an upgrade and some Web services integration that the 80 or so pilot customers are trying out.

But what’s SAP’s strategy for selling applications like HR, or line-of-business apps, to small and midsized companies?  It seems to be companies like GT Solar will fall in the middle, leaving even more targets for companies like Salesforce.com, Workday and SuccessFactors.

What do you think? And what product or service from SAP would make your life easier?

Outliers: Some SAP customers not focusing on quick projects, quick SAP ROI

SAP held a roundtable in Boston yesterday afternoon, which featured a good sampling of industries and a who’s who of some of SAP’s biggest, and soon to be biggest, customers - Raytheon, Day & Zimmermann, Boston University, and GT Solar.

With the exception of Boston University, which is about to embark on a massive SAP rollout, all of the panelists indicated that their IT budgets would remain flat over the year and for some, through 2010.

We’ve heard over and over again that to meet economic challenges, customers are choosing quick projects with near immediate ROI. And that’s the case at the majority of companies. But it was interesting to hear a different perspective yesterday from companies that aren’t focusing on immediate gratification at all.

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The business of making good SaaS…that’s good for business

With 55 employees and light-manufacturing operations, NetSuite was an ideal enterprise software choice for GestureTek when it deployed the SaaS ERP application four years ago. But having worked with SAP at a previous employer, Gerry Sylvia, the production and logistics director, gladly would have thrown the vendor into the mix –if he knew they had a product.

“I had no idea what a NetSuite was from a hole in the ground,” said Sylvia, who was charged with picking new software. “But I’ve used Oracle, I’ve used SAP. If they had a similar product, I would have more than likely gone that way.”

The Tier 1 vendors still don’t have a true widely available SaaS ERP. SAP seems to be the closest — with Business ByDesign, the product it trotted out and then yanked from the market about two years ago, citing functionality concerns. It now says 40 customers have gone live with it, and another 40 will be online in the coming weeks.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the engineers at SAP can make, or even perhaps already have made, Business ByDesign work. The engineering prowess lies in making it as profitable as SAP wants, or needs, it to be. It’s something SAP itself admits.

The question of whether SaaS is a profitable business model seems largely to have been answered for the niche vendors. Salesforce.com achieved a profit margin of between 6% and 7% this year, up from 4% a year ago. NetSuite is also pulling in a profit, and today, NetSuite acquired QuickArrow to advance its creation a cloud-computing application suite for services-based companies.

But that question hasn’t faded for SAP, Oracle or Microsoft, which are used to margins up around the 30% mark.

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What’s SAP’s next move in a consolidating middleware market?

It’s been the million dollar question — why didn’t SAP buy IDS Scheer?

All the signs pointed to the beginning of a beautiful friendship — consistent rumors that SAP may make a play for IDS Scheer, the long-time partnership, the 60% overlap in customers. When I started covering SAP more than a year ago, “keeping an eye” on IDS Scheer was one of the first things my boss told me to do.

The truth is — I don’t know why SAP didn’t buy them. SAP didn’t want to comment on the deal when I asked.

The past being the past, let’s pose the next relevant question. We talk a lot on this blog about consolidation in the ERP space. But as Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang said when I spoke to him about the Software AG/IDS Scheer deal, this bodes more consolidation in the middleware market.

To that end, what are the consequences of continued consolidation in the middleware market — and what’s SAP’s next move?

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Is there innovation in SAP’s SCM software strategy?

“SAP’s Supply Chain Management Strategy and Offerings,” the topic of a recent report by Gartner Research’s Andrew White, brought to mind a question that was batted around the blogosphere last month.

Can the big vendors drive software innovation?

For its part, SAP has a strong supply chain management vision, White said. Partnering with supply chain management vendors like i2 early on and jumping on the RFID trend have proved beneficial.

Plus, SAP sells some innovative, out-of-the-box supply chain management products, White said. Take, for instance, SAP’s supply network collaboration software. It’s completely independent of the ERP backbone — it has its own database. It grew out of procurement capabilities and acts as a hub for manufacturers to communicate better with suppliers. Customers are using it to better coordinate sales, supply and even to integrate different ERP systems.

But for a company that bleeds supply chain management, can SAP’s software really be considered innovative?

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As Oracle advances Fusion middleware, what’s SAP’s next move?

“SAP will stick to software,” was the headline from SAP CEO Leo Apotheker’s interview in the Wall Street Journal last week.

I don’t think anybody’s really speculated that SAP will do anything but stick to selling software. It seems unlikely that they’d target this “one stop-shopping” approach Oracle is pushing (Sun acquisition) when the partnership approach SAP’s taken to infrastructure has worked so well over the last few years.

However, SAP’s also been very open in the past year that in terms of selling software, it knows it can no longer develop everything organically that it needs to stay competitive.

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