Version 3.0 of SAP AG’s R/3 client-server financial and accounting software, which is scheduled for release in early 1995, should be object-oriented and fully compatible with the mainframe version, R/2. The various modules that make up every application are already claimed to be 80% of the way there, as R/3 was apparently written with object technology in mind – the repository, middleware, and performance tools, collectively known as the Basis system, are all object-oriented too, as is the SAP Development Environment. And SAP is currently evaluating which vendor’s object request broker it should go for. Meanwhile, although the current version of R/3 – 2.1 – supports a range of Unix environments, such as IBM Corp’s AIX and SunSoft Inc’s Solaris, SAP believes the range of hardware it runs on will be greatly increased via the Windows NT version, which should be available first on Sequent Computer Systems Corp machines by next quarter. For example, the company says, IBM has committed to put NT on the RS/6000 as has Digital Equipment Corp on its Alpha AXPs. Moreover, trials of a shrink-wrapped version of R/3 running under NT on a PowerPC laptop are currently under way in Germany. The NT version of R/3 will initially support Oracle Corp databases, but support for Sybase, Informix, Software AG’s Entire SQL and IBM’s DB2/6000 is likely to follow over the course of the year. A version for Chicago should materialise by about mid-1994, and R/3 customers will be able to use an Apple Computer Inc Macintosh front-end from the end of the second quarter, although they already are doing so in Germany. Furthermore, SAP will start reselling iXOS Software GmbH’s document management and imaging processing software as an R/3 module in the second or third quarter. And the company says it has now removed the product’s former 200-user ceiling. While it boasts that up to 2,000 concurrent users can now exploit the system, it expects this figure to double by the end of the year by virtue of faster CPUs and clustering options. SAP now has 1,200 R/3 customers worldwide compared with 2,000 for R/2, but is close to signing two big R/3 deals in the UK with an unnamed merchant bank and insurance firm.
