German software giant SAP AG used the first day of its Sapphire ’98 user conference in Los Angeles yesterday to unveil plans to extend the reach of the company’s products away from the traditional back-office space into new, standalone application environments. The company, already the leading vendor in the ERP (enterprise resource planning) software market, said it plans to offer new, front-end applications to make the data held in its flagship R/3 system more easy to access. The company’s co- founder, co-chairman and CEO Hasso Plattner said SAP plans to offer a set of customer care, or customer relationship management applications, for sales, marketing and service operations. The applications will be designed to let users perform such tasks as marketing analysis and planning, identifying, acquiring, managing and retaining customers, or to offer product service and support functions. Certain functions of the new applications, grouped together under the marketing banner SAP Focus, are already available within SAP’s core R/3 software. But Plattner said the technology was being extended and taken out of R/3 to form separate, standalone bundles aimed at specific customers. He stressed that the new products would have to stand or fall by their own merits and would not be allowed to ride the R/3 bandwagon. By the end of this year, he said SAP would roll out the sales force automation component, email and internet-based direct marketing, telesales and call center operations. Field service operations will follow in 1999, officials said. Plattner said the overall theme of the changes was to reduce total cost of ownership of our complete offering. He told the audience gathered for the keynote address yesterday: I want people to be able to use a portion of the system (R/3) with zero training. He added that SAP couldn’t expect sales people, for example, to spend five days in training trying to learn how to use R/3. The company also used a press conference here Sunday to announce the first customer shipment of its Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), part of the company’s Supply Chain Optimization, Planning and Execution (SCOPE) initiative. The product is slated for general availability by year-end, SAP said. The software giant also announced the general availability of its Business Information Warehouse data warehousing software product; the first part of its data analysis suite. The APO function will draw on SAP’s Business Information Warehouse to point out the most efficient production methods. Plattner said SAP’s data warehouse product was intended to compete with every data warehouse company in the world, and be better than them. He stressed the software was designed to be an open system, not just for use with its R/3 software, but for use with any ERP or data provider. Under its ‘business intelligence’ initiative, the company will also begin to offer what it calls task-specific cockpits using its new SEM (strategic enterprise management) software application. Addressing the much-voiced complaint that R3 data is only available to the select few, the cockpits are intended to present specific, tailored data to managers to help them make strategic decisions. The SEM software draws on a number of R/3 components and applications and use graphical user interfaces to allow, for example, the slicing of data or the analyses (and subsequent fulfillment) of pre-stated business objectives. In addition, SAP yesterday announced Release 4.5 of SAP Human Resources (HR), which along with the previous version, Release 4.0, becomes the second core R/3 application delivered as an independent component on its own. A whole host of third party vendors crowded the show floor to voice their support for SAP. Among them, Netscape said it would extend its Application Server to support R/3. The company said it would follow up later this year with a SAP-specific version of its Application Server that will include development tools.
