Salesforce.com to Facilitate SAP Integration

The company has not set a formal release date yet, but it's in development with an SAP AG integration module.

While there are no exact release dates to pin a formal announcement on, a Salesforce.com spokesperson confirmed April 6 that the company is in development with an SAP AG integration module, based on code the company uses in its application hosting service. The work stems from a recent addition to the Salesforce.com executive team, according to Bruce Francis, a spokesman for Salesforce.com. On Feb. 27 the company hired Cindy Warner as the senior vice president of Global Integration Services.
A convert from Accenture, where she was the SAP CRM solution director, Warner is charged in her new role with creating an ecosystem that provides integration to legacy ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications—licensed, arguably, by a large portion of Salesforce.coms customer base. Salesforce.com provides CRM (customer relationship management) software. With an integration module to SAP under way, the next question is whether Salesforce is planning a separate module for integration with Oracles applications (including PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications, which Oracle now owns). Francis did not confirm an Oracle module but said Warner is doing "everything in her power" to facilitate smooth integration with third-party applications. Salesforce.com customers currently integrate with SAP, Oracle and other third-party ERP applications via standard API (application protocol interface) coding. Read more here about Oracles rivalry with SAP. "Does [Warners hiring] mean that Cindy will take it to the next level and make integration as frictionless as possible? Absolutely," said Francis, who cautioned that Warners integration work with SAP will not come in the form of a stand-alone product, but through AppExchange capabilities. AppExchange is Salesforce.coms application marketplace and platform that supports integration with ERP, accounting and other applications. On a related note, SAP is said to be gearing up to provide an on demand offering based around its Business One suite of applications for small companies. SAP already has one on demand application in the market: CRM. The hybrid application, announced Feb. 2, is delivered on what SAP calls an "isolated tenancy" model which, like a multi-tenancy model, pushes quarterly upgrades to customers en masse. The difference with isolated tenancy is that a template of each customers CRM installation is maintained on a separate database. What the isolated model avoids is across-the-board outages that can occur with multi-tenancy models where all customers are on the same server, SAP officials said at the Feb. 2 press conference introducing CRM on demand; what it promotes is an easy upgrade to SAPs on premises software. SAP officials were not immediately available for comment on the companys Business One plans. Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis about productivity and business solutions.