SAP goes on offensive at Sapphire

German giant buys two firms and defends A1S, MDM and CRM progress

SAP was on the offensive and defensive at its Sapphire conference in Vienna this week, buying two companies and denying suggestions that it is suffering problems in key product areas.

SAP announced the acquisition of Wicom Communications, a Finnish IP contact centre and communications service provider that SAP described as the “future of CRM”.

SAP’s CRM chief Bob Stutz said the long-term plan was to integrate WiCom into applications so that “communication processes become part of the application”.

Chief executive Henning Kagermann said, “For too many years people have viewed the areas of operate, collaborate and communicate as separate areas. Applications of the future look to these areas from a holistic point of view.”

Analyst firm Gartner recently said such environments “will result in faster response times, more accurate interactions and better social context for the communications.”

SAP also announced the purchase of MaXware, an identity-management firm that it will use to supplement the NetWeaver platform, managing identities of employees, customers and partners, spanning systems and business processes.

In a question-and-answer session with media, SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann took the unusual step of answering criticisms made in articles about SAP’s recent progress.

“We have already world-class CRM and they will make it even better so there’s not even an intention to change something,” he said.

Kagermann claimed that SAP’s master data management (MDM) product will “sell more than I expected this year”.

He also played down suggestions that SAP is having problems with A1S, its plan to have a hosted set of applications aimed at mid-market customers.

“As long as the product is not volume-ready we will have problems every day but we have no unexpected problems,” he said. “We have some problems we expect with a normal launch.”

Leo Apotheker, SAP’s deputy chief executive, said he is “confident we will be volume ready” by the first quarter of 2008, at which time the firm will detail its business strategy for A1S.

Pressed on whether it would inevitably be a direct-sold service, Apotheker said, “Our go-to-market is going to be by all possible and appropriate models from direct to indirect, by our business partners [and] exploiting the web.”

Separately, SAP announced a pact with Novell that will see the firms jointly support customers running SAP applications on Suse Linux Enterprise Server.