SAP tries to prove its Web credentials

By Stephanie Holt

InfoWorld, 09/15/99

At SAP's user group, SAPphire, in Philadelphia this week, the opening message from company leaders was simple: SAP does get the Net.

SAPphire's opening Tuesday marked the launch of SAP's complete Internet strategy, mySAP.com, which has two major components: mySAP.com Workplace, a role-based employee information portal, and mySAP.com Marketplace, a set of online trading communities and information sites, through which commodities can be sold, auctioned, collaboratively designed, and so forth. The marketplaces will also feature news, industry information, and discussion forums, company officials said.

As part of this plan, SAP is partnering with and investing in Industry to Industry, a Boston-based provider of Web-based trading networks, officials said.

The point of the whole conference is "to show our commitment to the Internet," SAP co-chairman and co-CEO Hasso Plattner said in his opening remarks Tuesday.

Although SAP had been building Internet solutions for years, from its original three-tier client-server architecture that is well-suited for Web clients to the colorful, more user-friendly EnjoySAP graphical interfaces introduced in the last several months, "the market didn't take SAP seriously as a player in the Internet," Plattner said.

SAP wanted to make sure its Internet solutions actually worked and could be delivered on time, so rather than engaging in hype or tit-for-tat criticism like Oracle and some other competitors, it "turned the other cheek" until now, Plattner added.

Now, SAP believes it is ahead of the pack, since its mySAP.com products will be generally available by Sept. 30, Plattner said. This compares favorably with Oracle, whose 11I Internet-based applications begin shipping early next year, according to SAP officials.

In contrast to past SAP policy, mySAP.com applications and portals will freely integrate with external sources of information and other systems, even if they are not from SAP, Plattner said.

To further this aim, SAP is endorsing many integration and electronic commerce communication standards, including Hewlett-Packard's E-Speak, Microsoft's BizTalk, and IBM's WebSphere, he added.

Another major contrast with past practice is that SAP is ceding many areas of business automation and Web services to partners.

"We are not so defensive any more," Plattner said Tuesday. "We know we cannot be everything to everybody," so partners will fill the gaps, he said.

Other areas SAP plans to expand on this week are hosting and outsourcing its applications, as announced by Siemens Business Services and others, and a satellite-based TV and Web network of training and upgrade information, Plattner added.

Setting up trading networks among companies is not a unique idea, but SAP should have a head start due to the size and influence of its user community, about 12,000 companies, co-chairman and CEO Henning Kagermann said.

The push into online trading and collaboration through the Marketplace is "a way to drive more traffic through SAP's applications," which the company is anxious to do because demand is slowing for its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) modules such as HR, manufacturing, and finances, said analyst Steve Cole at Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass.

However, SAP and other ERP vendors including Oracle and PeopleSoft are likely to take second place to a more industry-centric class of portals and trading sites such as VerticalNet and Chemdex, which have expertise in the actual fields, Cole added.

But the other major chunk of mySAP.com, the Workplace portal, will be very appealing, Cole added. "The roles-based approach ... to how you buy SAP products is good," in that it lets users pay for only as much access as they want to a wide range of modules, from a few minutes a month of casual questions to deep, powerful access, he said.

Users seemed impressed by the possibilities of mySAP.com but reserved judgment about how well it would work in practice.

"It's interesting. I'm anxious to see what it can do," said Rosemary Burrows, project manager at Earthgrains Bakery, in St. Louis.

"It all sounds very positive. For our industry, aerospace and defense, it has some applications. But it's going to take some time to work out," said an executive with a U.S. aerospace company, who asked not to be named.