Friday, February 03, 2006
Telecoms and Software News
Telecoms and Software News: "In an interview in today's German edition of the FT, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann speaks at length about SAP's venture into the software-as-a-service market. This is ahead of the formal launch, which takes place today in California in what will be the early evening for most of our readers.
The service will be sold on a per-user price, and will be aimed at enterprises and the upper end of the 'mid-sized' market - still large companies but not 'Fortune 1000' companies. This is an area that Kagermann says is difficult for other vendors (that will be news to salesforce.com!). It will be hosted by IBM, but Kagermann says he wants to have other partners for future products - he says that SAP will try to avoid competition (or perhaps conflict) between hosting partners. This gives us the impression that this will be sold by the partner, not SAP itself. He also said that the service will be compatible with software deployed conventionally, so that customers can switch to running the software themselves internally."
The service will be sold on a per-user price, and will be aimed at enterprises and the upper end of the 'mid-sized' market - still large companies but not 'Fortune 1000' companies. This is an area that Kagermann says is difficult for other vendors (that will be news to salesforce.com!). It will be hosted by IBM, but Kagermann says he wants to have other partners for future products - he says that SAP will try to avoid competition (or perhaps conflict) between hosting partners. This gives us the impression that this will be sold by the partner, not SAP itself. He also said that the service will be compatible with software deployed conventionally, so that customers can switch to running the software themselves internally."
