SAP has announced SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service, taking the logical but no less important step of taking its SAP HANA platform to the cloud, giving organizations a new deployment option for the in-memory platform.

The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service will enable organizations to run mission-critical instances of SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and Netweaver Business Warehouse solutions in the cloud, powered by HANA.

SAP plans to deliver the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud through its partners within what SAP calls an “open + us” strategy, offering the capabilities from the partner data centers and/or SAP’s own data centers located worldwide. Read the rest of this entry »

SAP has announced the release of three new rapid-deployment solutions (RDS) for companies implementing the recently unveiled SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA. These solutions are making innovations like SAP HANA more accessible to enterprise customers looking to boost their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) operations with real-time analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s what TEC analysts have to say about some of the more significant enterprise software developments of 2012.

Aleksey Osintsev, TEC Research Analyst, on cloud ERP:
For the ERP software space, 2012 was a year of extensive appraisal of the suitability of cloud-based ERP software to the manufacturing industry. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) concept is being clarified, and lessons are being learned by manufacturing companies around the globe. New vendors are offering various cloud-only ERP solutions for manufacturing, while many traditional vendors have developed cloud or SaaS versions of their existing applications, or new cloud systems that parallel the older on-premise ones. Even more significantly, manufacturers are giving cloud deployment serious consideration as part of their IT strategy for the future.

From what I saw during 2012, businesses are starting to realize that perhaps they should not be lemmings in following the crowd to the cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

The recently held SAPPHIRE NOW 2011 event in Orlando, Florida had many newsworthy items with regards to SAP’s solutions for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). For one, the much publicized and anticipated multi-tenanted software as a service (SaaS) SAP Business ByDesign product has reached a milestone of 500 customers and availability in a dozen countries or so (after initial hiccups and faltering). For its part, the proven lower-end SAP BusinessOne offering has reached a whopping 30,000 customers worldwide.

The upper-end product for SMEs, SAP Business All-in-One, which packages functionality from the flagship SAP ERP product (i.e., the two products have the exact same DNA), continues to do well in its target markets. The product has lately been bolstered by 22 (and many more coming soon) SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions (SAP RDS), which are fixed-scope and fixed-price add-on (tuck-in) sets of focused functionality that can be deployed with SAP Business All-in-One, including those in the realm of supply chain management (SCM), sales & marketing, product development & manufacturing, and finance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series depicted the three evolutionary phases (or waves) of software as a service (SaaS) and the adoption of cloud computing. The post ended with some glimpses into the future and likely implications for SaaS users.

Part 2 then explored the apparent opportunities and accompanying challenges (and painstaking soul-searching exercises) that SaaS aspirants face in their endeavors. Some concrete examples of vendors and their new strategies and solutions were presented, most notably SAP Business ByDesign.

Part 3 of this blog series analyzes recent SaaS initiatives by mainstream mega-vendors with some concrete examples. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me start this blog post with a huge disclaimer: I have no intentions of wilfully beating up on SAP whatsoever!

Sure, the enterprise applications titan has lately been embroiled in an intellectual property lawsuit with archrival Oracle over improper use of support data through its TomorrowNow third-party support (recently discontinued) subsidiary.

As if this wasn’t enough, SAP is being sued again, and this time over an allegedly failed software implementation. Namely, in late March, Waste Management Inc. filed suit against SAP with claims of fraud (or gross over-promise, if one wants to sound a bit gentler here). Read the rest of this entry »