By William Fellows
SAP AG has made Cupertino, California start-up Eonline Inc its third and final certified application service provider partner for the time being. The 130-day old company which was started by former SAP employees and consultants, joins Qwest Communications and EDS in the outsourced market for application development, hosting, management and delivery of SAP applications. Eonline will deliver SAP programs to low- and middle-market companies over the internet or VPNs and expects there to be some competition on accounts with Qwest and EDS. Eonline’s web site was supposed to go live yesterday afternoon but was still under construction at www.eonlineinc.com when this story was filed.
Eonline is already hosting two customers from its data center in Phoenix, Arizona. One, hotel reservation company Rezsolutions Inc has 400 users in 39 countries. Eonline expects to add a European data center early next year. The 40-person company says it has nearly 1,000 SAP consultants it can call on and is adding employees at 15 a month. It will also support SAP’s MySap.com personalized business process services.
Eonline CEO, Adrian Ionel told ComputerWire that SAP and other ERP applications are far from being commodity applications, rather that they offer entire ecosystems in which companies can develop application strategies that will bring them competitive advantage and differentiation. That’s a far cry from Qwest Communications, which last month told us that companies may once have used the implementation of ERP, workflow and other applications to gain competitive advantage, but that business processes are no longer the differentiator, rather they are strictly utility.
Eonline has raised private and venture funding but isn’t saying how much or from where. SAP says it supports three outsourcing models: ASP, application management outsourcing where the user has the hardware at its facility and the application is managed onsite or remotely, and business process outsourcing. SAP declined to say how much business it has won since it launched its outsourcing program in February but claims that sales have exceeded expectations.
