German software giant SAP AG yesterday became the latest enterprise resource planning vendor to unveil plans for cashing in on the internet with the launch of a portal and new e-commerce strategy. The company chose the first day of its Sapphire user conference in Nice, France to launch mySAP.com; a series of portals that provide users with web-based access to both SAP and third party applications. By making back-end ERP data available over the internet, and linking it with other front-end systems, SAP says it will help its customers buy and sell products over the web, as well as enabling them to better manage their customer orders, do business with their partners and help sales forces stay in better contact with call centers.
Up until now, the software giant has been slow to embrace the e- commerce movement but with recent announcements from the likes of rivals Oracle Corp, PeopleSoft Inc and Baan Co, SAP has finally decided to drag itself onto the internet bandwagon. And it’s not just ERP vendors that have joined the portal frenzy. Sales force automation software vendor, Siebel Systems Inc has made its portal, Sales.com, available to its customers as has customer relationship management software supplier, Geac Computer Corp. And CRM vendor, Onyx Software Corp and ERP supplier, Lawson Software Inc are also developing portal strategies.
Speaking at a press conference yesterday, SAP’s senior VP of corporate marketing, Gunther Tolkmit, said that the MySap.com portal would serve as a digital marketplace that will combine SAP data, third-party content, such as news, travel and financial information, and e-commerce services. As well as providing access to its own applications over the web, SAP wants to develop the portal into a full-scale e-commerce site that lets users purchase goods from other partners selling related hardware and software products. Although it made no formal announcement yesterday, SAP said it had received interest from a number of vendors, including Microsoft, EDS, Siemens, Cisco, IBM, and Dell, to sell their products over the site. Exactly how SAP will make money on the site has not yet been clearly defined, but it’s likely the vendor will charge partner companies a referral fee, as well some kind of subscription fee for users who get extra services, Tolkmit said. More partnership details are expected in the third quarter, he added.
Access to SAP data will be enabled through any device that runs a browser, so users can link into their back-end ERP data from a handheld PC if they choose. Both SAP’s customer relationship- management software, released this month, and its B2B product, designed for business-to-business procurement between companies, will also become accessible to users over the web. A new business-to-business selling product, due to be released in the fourth quarter, will also be made available over the web, SAP said, alongwith its business-to-consumer and SAP employee self- service products.
Alongside the standard company-wide mySap.com portal, the vendor said it also plans to launch a version, called mySAP-Employee Workplace, which can be personalized for individual users who will each gain single sign-on access to their chosen applications and data. As well as enabling access to information within the enterprise, the portal will also enable users to access data over of the internet for such things as booking tickets or checking travel times. There will also be another version developed for home users, SAP said.
In addition, as part of its new internet strategy, SAP said that it has signed partnerships with a number of service providers, including British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and EDS, to offer SAP applications on an outsourced basis. It is specifically geared towards small and medium businesses which do not want to run their own R/3 or SAP applications. Tolkmit said the alliances were a way of letting a new breed of customers – as opposed to the usual large corporates typical of most SAP implementations – get their hands of ERP software off the shelf without having to go through the hassle of buying and running their own servers.
