IBM, Atos Origin, Capgemini and Wipro join SAP as launch partners for SAP Business Suite 7, providing consulting resources and participating in a product ramp-up. SAP Business Suite 7, slated for general adoption in the summer of 2009, will allow businesses to streamline their operational performance while reducing their IT overhead, SAP says.NEW
YORKWith representatives from launch
partners including IBM in attendance, SAP
unveiled SAP Business Suite 7, designed to help companies create and manage
efficient and flexible business processes at lower cost, in a Feb. 4
presentation at its headquarters here.
IBM
and SAP have a long collaboration record, most recently with their joint
creation of Alloy, a messaging and collaboration enterprise application due
in March.
SAP
has positioned its new modular software library as a boon to companies
wrestling with the economic crisis, citing Business Suite 7's ability to
streamline everyday business processes while saving IT administrative costs.
SAP
is no stranger to products designed to help companies save money; on Feb. 2, SAP announced a partnership with Landis+Gyr on
software developed to shave costs for energy utilities.
SAP
Business Suite 7 took 15 months to develop, was released for ramp-ups on Nov. 21, 2008, and is
expected to undergo general adoption in summer of 2009.
IBM,
Capgemini, Wipro and Atos Origin have been participating in the ramp-up, and
will provide certified consulting resources and co-marketing activities as
Business Suite 7 rolls out to a broader base of users.
"We
believe this is the future of enterprise computing," Lo Apotheker, co-CEO
of SAP, said before the demo. "We
actually have a vision of how business should evolve in the future: We believe
that the world is evolving toward business networks."
According
to SAP, Business Suite 7's "enhancement
packages," which allow users to cherry-pick which functionalities they
need without upgrading an entire solution, are key in reducing IT costs.
Business
Suite 7 also offers
"value scenarios" that provide users with end-to-end business processes
that can be implemented step by step to improve efficiency and overcome problems.
"Value scenarios" include integrated product development, which
demonstrates SAP Business Suite 7's ability
to seamlessly enact processes across multiple parts of a company, SAP
said.
As
an example of this, SAP showed the audience Business
Suite 7's user dashboard screen, which displayed metrics such as revenue and
profit over time, and even what customers are Twittering about a product.
In
the example, the software's user, a maker of GPS
devices, noticed a rising amount of Twitter chatter about the company's latest
product having a faulty viewscreen. Using SAP
software, the GPS maker clicked over to an
engineering screen to look at the product component and identify the problem;
and from there moved on to sales, finance and supply-side management to
actually correct the situation.
This
integration of analytical and process applications can allow decision makers to
respond quickly to things that aren't working, potentially saving time and
revenue.
Business
Suite 7 can also help users
capture new opportunities via SOA (service-oriented architecture). In the demo
example, a retail territory manager in California
used a dashboard to analyze the ZIP code around the retail company's stores for
pockets of high-income households. The user then created a 'Welcome campaign,'
complete with a coupon for the store, and had it mailed to the target group chosen
through that earlier data mining. Afterward, the user clicked back to the
dashboard to see revenue rising.
"What
the CEO gets is an end-to-end business
process," Apotheker said.
If
Business Suite 7, with its focus on optimizing business performance and
increasing IT savings, appeals to customers looking for ways to save costs in
the current economic environment, that's mostly a happy coincidence for SAP.
When the company started developing the software suite at the end of 2006, it
was following its own long-term trend toward systems that take advantage of
value and modular, piecemeal consumption.
"After Lehman Brothers collapsed on Sept. 15, we
didn't suddenly decide to build things that were relevant," Richard
Campione, SAP senior vice president of suite solution management for CRM on
demand, said in an interview. "But the economic situation plays into
where we've been trending for years."
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