Firms to get early taste of SAP's A1S

SAP has been discussing its plans for its hosted A1S service

SAP is gearing up for the release of its much-discussed A1S service, with up to 20 customers due to go live this year.

A1S is SAP’s attempt to appeal to small and medium-sized businesses with a hosted suite of business applications. As such, pundits have compared it to the Salesforce.com platform and other software-as-a-service offerings where apps are accessed over the web.

SAP still intends to be ready for volume uptake in early 2008 but plans a “soft release” later this year with 12 to 20 UK companies involved and one brand-name showcase customer already in “pre-live testing”, said SAP UK managing director Steve Rogers in an interview with IT Week.

“We don’t want to say it’s commercially available and not have tested our ability to deliver high rates of robustness and availability,” Rogers added.