By Siobhan Kennedy
A spokesperson for SAP AG yesterday admitted that the company’s decision to rename its internet strategy, System mySAP.com was confusing and said the ERP vendor had decided to revert to the old name, mySAP.com, from here on in. And PeopleSoft Inc said it would no longer push the name for its web strategy, PeopleSoft Business Network, preferring instead to focus on e-business communities.
The SAP spokesperson, who asked to remain nameless, said the decision to change the name had been a mistake and admitted it had only served to confuse its users. The German software giant originally announced the name mySAP.com at its Sapphire user show in Nice in May. The name, SAP said, described the company’s overall internet strategy, under which it would deliver a roles- based portal allowing users access to its own ERP applications, third party software and other services on the internet. But just two months later, in July, it relaunched the strategy, this time referring to it as System mySAP.com.
At the time, SAP said it had made the changes to make things more simple for its customers. Gunther Tolkmit, SAP’s senior VP of corporate marketing told ComputerWire We decided we needed to go one step further…we needed an actual product…something that could be evaluated, demonstrated and hosted over the internet with everything integrated from front to back end.
But yesterday the spokesperson said that SAP had made the changes to emphasize the fact that mySAP.com was made up of a series of components, a complete system rather than just a one-off offering. But it confused many people, and that’s very unfortunate, the spokesperson said. We just wanted to stress it wasn’t about a single component, but perhaps it was too much of an engineering term.
In a similar move, while PeopleSoft was busy touting its internet strategy at its user conference in New Orleans this week, there was no mention of its much-publicized PSBN (PeopleSoft Business Network). That was the name it gave to describe its overarching internet and e-commerce strategy but as ComputerWire previously reported, the company is now shying away from the term, dropping it from its press material and only referring to individual web- enabled applications and so-called business communities.
While PeopleSoft has denied dropping PSBN to date, Mark Nittler, PeopleSoft’s vice president of applications yesterday admitted there was understandable confusion about the strategy. He said the term was coined to describe the vendor’s strategy for delivery applications for e-business. And now that we’ve started doing that we want to focus on those tangible, deliverable applications, he said. He added that the company wasn’t killing PSBN, but admitted it wouldn’t be putting the name forward as part of its marketing material anymore. á
