Guest post: AccMan blogger and deep thinker on enterprise software Dennis Howlett, along with some of the other Enterprise Irregulars, is in Vienna for SAP's Euro Sapphire conference. It covers the same material as Sapphire Atlanta, which Dennis attended and took place last month.
SAP's been working three years on developing a new business application suite and business model. Code-named A1S, the suite is aimed at the lower end of the mid-sized company segment, which is comprised of about 1 million companies.
SAP has been talking up its forthcoming solution for the mid-market, A1S, that will help the company grow from around 40,000 customers to 100,000 by 2010. According to Shai Agassi, president of SAP's Products & Technology Group, the goal of new suite is to dramatically reduce the tax across technology, operations, user training, integration and infrastructure for implementing and running ERP applications.
During his presentation at SAP TechEd '07, Peter Zencke, a member of SAP's Executive Board and head of R&D, made it clear to the 6,000 SAP developers in attendance that the forthcoming Business ByDesign ERP suite for the mid-market is technological milestone for the company. "We put everything into one, NetWeaver end-to-end," he said regarding Business ByDesign.
Marc Benioff took the stage at Moscone Center before an estimated 7,000 salesforce.com adherents from 42 countries to tout a "new force for innovation.
I met with Denis Browne, senior vice president of imagineering at SAP Labs. He isn't on loan from Disney, which came up with "imagineering" portmanteau in the 1950's.
Since Workday publicly appeared on the scene in January 2006, it has been self-described as a "revolutionary application platform and the next generation of business applications to drive your enterprise's performance," with applications that will be "dramatically easy to use, be responsive to your organization's changing needs and will significantly lower your total cost of ownership.
SAP held a dog and pony show, including a ribbon cutting ceremony, for the unveiling of its new Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto. "The intention is for this is to be a working lab, not just a slick showcase for customers," said Zia Yusef, executive vice president of the Global Ecosystem and Partner Group at SAP.
SAP co-founder and Chairman of the Supervisory Board Hasso Plattner gave a reprise of his "New Idea" Sapphire presentation at Software 2007. The presentation covers many concepts (see below), which I wrote about in this post from SAP's Sapphire conference in Atlanta last month, that underlie SAP's new code base, code-named A1S, aimed at small- and medium-sized business and due sometime in 2008.
Over 35 years since co-founding SAP, Hasso Plattner has been seeking to transform business software. Speaking at SAP annual Sapphire conference in Atlanta, Plattner gave a seminar on next-generation software, in which he detailed many of the main principles behind the company's next-generation product A1S business suite, without mentioning the code-named product, which is due to ship next year (I wrote about A1S here, from a conversation with Hans-Peter Klaey, president of Global SME for SAP).
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