SAP is expected to announce plans today to integrate its
online services more closely with its traditional software
business.
The plans will be unveiled at a conference in the Netherlands by
John Wookey, SAP's executive vice-president in charge of on-demand
services, according to the
Financial Times.
The initiative, which targets SAP's large customers, will mark
the German enterprise software company's second attempt at
providing software-as-a-service (SaaS).
SAP's first attempts at SaaS with a service for salespeople to
manage customer relationships and its
Business By Design online applications for medium-sized
companies, have failed to gain momentum.
This has forced SAP back to the drawing board to plan a new
approach that is expected to be a hybrid model that will attempt to
take advantage of the big installed base of SAP's business
applications.
Ahead of today's announcement, Wookey has indicated that the new
approach will allow customers to mix online services and
traditional software without splitting a company's data into
different systems.
But the online applications will do things that SAP's core
software does not and will automatically integrate with SAP
software that customers run on their own in-house systems,
according the
Wall Street Journal.
The first online application, due for release in the third
quarter of the year, will be aimed at helping businesses with
sourcing. This will be followed by customer and expense management
applications.
Wookey has also indicated that SAP could eventually open up its
technology to allow other developers to build on-demand services
that would tie into its software.