At its user conference in Philadelphia, SAP AG unveiled a raft of strategies and partnerships to help it maintain its lead over competitors such as Oracle Corp and PeopleSoft Inc and to stave off continuing user laments about the expense and time-drain of implementing its R/3 enterprise applications suite. SAP has a hold of 32.1% of the enterprise application market, according to International Data Corp, followed by Oracle Corp with 8.2% and PeopleSoft Inc with 5.9%. To keep that lead, SAP is responding to complaints about its all-or-none R/3 applications offering by componentizing the suite, so that users can buy only the modules they need, such as human resources or accounting. The first components will ship with R/3 version 3.1, due out at year end. SAP will ship R/3 release 4.0 during the third quarter of 1997. Version 4.0 will include new business processes for retail and public sector industries and supply chain financial enhancements. Separate components that will ship with R/3 4.0 include human resources, product data management and treasury management. SAP will also begin selling indirect for the first time in North America by allowing resellers to offer and support its R/3 software to customer firms with annual revenues under $200m; SAP says it has about 2,000 sites that fall into that revenue category worldwide. SAP also announced a joint technology and marketing deal with Haht Software Inc, Raleigh, North Carolina, under which SAP customers will be able to use the Hahtsite Internet development environment to create Web-based applications that interface directly with their existing R/3 application logic; SAP will resell Hahtsite.
