The “little” SAP Business One solution is an unsung hero of sorts at SAP. Indeed, more than 38,000 customers worldwide in nearly 30 languages and over 630 partners are often ignored as less newsworthy by market observers. The business management solution for small businesses (with 10–20 users, on average) can be deployed on premises or in the cloud, and is accessible via mobile devices.

During the SAPPHIRENOW 2013 conference, SAP announced the general availability of the 9.0 version of the SAP Business One running on Microsoft SQL Server (which is the product’s original database). With more than 50 new features, the latest version offers enhanced capabilities for warehouse management, infrastructure, and inventory management, as well as improved systems performance.

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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 »

At the recently held Inforum 2013 conference, many ears pricked up at the announcement of Infor Sky Vault, a big data initiative that leverages Infor’s ION middleware, micro-vertical expertise, and visually appealing dashboards developed by Infor ION business intelligence (BI) experts and designed by Hook & Loop, Infor’s recently incubated Manhattan-based in-house design agency. Infor Sky Vault is planned to launch in the second half of 2013 with predefined content for sales finance, and production. Additional functional areas and industries will be added in subsequent iterations.

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For a long time, PROS Inc. was a prominent pricing management software provider for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) industries. Lately, however, the vendor has been leveraging its decades-long experience in handling large volumes of data to provide big data applications for sales effectiveness (pricing being only a part thereof). In other words, PROS now delivers prescriptive analytics and data science to help customers identify sales opportunities, develop offers, and set prices.

PROS has announced that it has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with SAP to embed the SAP HANA platform with its big data apps. SAP HANA is a real-time in-memory database platform that streamlines analytics, planning, predictive, and sentiment assessments to allow business to operate in real time.

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While some analysts may question the true revenue figure that can be attributed solely to SAP HANA (i.e., whether SAP is intentionally crediting HANA with revenues that might be attributable to other SAP offerings), the fact remains that businesses have currently only just scratched the surface of SAP HANA’s potential. For example, SAP recently announced that HANA would underpin new releases of manufacturing solutions as well as updates for existing solutions covering engineering, manufacturing, and sustainable operations. The announcement was made at Hannover Messe 2013, held April 8-12 in Hannover, Germany.

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While SAP has lately given huge publicity to in-memory computing via its incessant promotion of SAP HANA, the technology has been around since the late 1990s, and there are currently over 50 software vendors delivering such proven solutions. Most recently, during the COLLABORATE ’13 Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) conference, Oracle announced new Oracle In-Memory Applications for Oracle Engineered Systems, leveraging dynamic random access memory (DRAM), flash memories, and the near zero latency InfiniBand network fabric to run ten to twenty times faster than commodity hardware. These tools can achieve these impressive speeds by transforming batch processing to real-time and shortening response time with improved user interface (UI) rendering.

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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 »

SAP is steadily and consistently expanding its SAP HANA–powered business software offerings. As it has been announced at CeBIT 2013, one of the world’s major computer and electronic industry trade shows, in Hanover, Germany, SAP’s Business One version for SAP HANA is now available in restricted shipment mode. Obviously, it will become a commercial version pretty soon. Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that SAP HANA’s launch has been the catalyst for not only in-house innovation, but also SAP’s onslaught of tuck-in acquisitions of its close partners. After the recent SmartOps acquisition in the supply chain management (SCM) space, SAP today announced plans to acquire Camilion, a provider of insurance product development, product lifecycle, and underwriting solutions that help insurance companies improve the quality of the business they underwrite and bring new products to market faster. Camilion was founded in 2001 and insurers use its products to gain enterprise-wide agility with their products and underwriting. The vendor was privately held, with offices in Canada and the United States. SAP and Camilion have collaborated since 2008.

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 At CeBIT 2013, in Hanover, Germany, SAP made public that its SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application is now powered by the SAP HANA platform. Made available to SAP employees, the solution facilitates real-time access to business-critical data. According to the press release, the migration of a business-critical CRM system to SAP CRM powered by SAP HANA was done in 2.5 months. Thus, SAP itself became the first customer to go live with the new solution. Read the rest of this entry »

After recently acquiring a sports ticketing and entertainment software solution, SAP has announced the launch of the SAP Scouting solution, an enterprise offering enabling sports franchises to improve their ability to identify and acquire the talent that should fuel their teams’ on-field success. SAP developed the solution in partnership with the National Football League’s (NFL) San Francisco 49ers during preparation for the 2013 NFL Draft. The announcement was made at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which was held March 1-2 in Boston.

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SAP has announced plans to acquire Ticket-Web GmbH & Co. KG, a provider of ticketing solutions and niche customer relationship management (CRM) software for sports and entertainment promoters. Ticket-Web employees will become part of SAP, and the deal is expected to close during the second quarter of 2013. The move is expected to pave the way for SAP to offer enhanced solutions to help promoters, venues, and teams market events over the Internet and better support arena management. Based in Wildau, Germany, Ticket-Web is established in Europe with its main product, ENTREE-tickets, an online ticketing service. The company also has niche complementary solutions for customer financial process management and CRM.

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Today is a big day for SAP and its customer base—at the SAP conference in New York the world-leading vendor has announced general availability of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP’s newest technical platform, SAP HANA.

What does it mean for businesses and other organizations that are potential and current clients of SAP? To bypass the technical details and terminology, the HANA platform is capable of capturing and analyzing data on a single in-memory platform with a data operation speed exceeding that of all known existing business solutions by tens of thousands times. This allows users to, for instance, perform business transactions that usually take hours in seconds, or practically in real time. For example, financial close, receivables management, or analysis of massive sales data segments can be done in moments. 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 »

Tableau’s has just released its new connector for SAP’s promising new platform: SAP HANA. Unveiled during SAP’s SAPPHIRE-TechEd  in Madrid, the connector will be able to explore information stored in the SAP HANA database and bring it to life with Tableau’s appealing and innovative visualizations. Read the rest of this entry »