SAP is having an investor symposium today in Las Vegas. After opening remarks from Stefan Gruber, the floor was turned over to Henning Kagermann and Peter Zencke who spent most of their time discussing the importances of SOA and how SAP was going to leverage their ongoing transition to BPP for the mid-market.
Not a lot of surprises in the overview for the hard core SAPers out there, but for the uninitiated the major crux of their talk was on the launch of a "new" ERP platform for the mid-market. Referred to as "New A1" (in contrast to SAP's current mid-market offering, A1), it will be a platform for the mid-market that leverages the same SOA-driven investments SAP has made in BPP.
SAP also announced support for a "SaaS" hosted version of the new solution; although SaaS purists will no doubt cast a wary eye at SAP's definition. SAP intends to offer a hosted version whereby each "New A1" customer will have their own dedicated blade server running their instance.
Takeaways from Kagermann/Zencke
- SAP is launching a new SOA-based mid-market solution; details to follow in early 2007
- Initially SAP will support its current A1 (All-in-One) offering in addition to the SOA-enabled version
- Mid-market needs differ from large customers (SAP hasn't historically acknowledged this in such a public forum)
- Faster implementation times required
- Lower TCO both at time of go-live and for ongoing maintenance and support
- Faster ROI with lower upfront costs
- SAP NetWeaver serves as the backbone of both mySAP 2005 to BPP (enterprise solution) and the new mid-market offering
- "SaaS" approach is being called "Lean Deployment for Lower TCO"
- Each customer will run on a dedicated blade server
- SAP will offer automatic updates and embedded support in a hosted environment
- Customer will own the data model and the right to configure as required
- 2010 Goals
- 2/3rds of installed base on Enterprise SOA
- 50% of SAP product revenues from new products [via a combination of buy and build]
- 100,000 customer
- 40%-45% of order entry generated from the mid-market
Jim Hagemann Snabe (GM -- Industry Solutions) presented on SAP's Industry Strategy; but unfortunately the webcast was malfunctioning at the time.
- Industry Strategy [pdf]
Up next...Updates on Duet (SAP/Microsoft Collaboration) and SAP's BI and Analytics Strategy
Note: At the time of this writing I, and/or funds I maintain discretionary control over, maintained long equity positions in MSFT and SAP. We also may, at times, carry derivative options on underlying positions as a hedge.
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