Four key elements to unravelling the mySAP.com riddle

By Adam Gifford

German software giant SAP's internet solution includes four key elements.

Workplace is a way of customising the SAP front-end so a user can access every SAP and non-SAP application and data source he or she needs to do the job from one web browser interface and with just one password.

SAP Asia Pacific chief executive Les Hayman's demonstration of this "enterprise portal" on his own laptop included a picture of his daughters (under the heading "The reason I work so hard"), a link to his stock portfolio with live updates, his e-mail, a link to Rugby World Cup sites, graphs of key performance indicators generated by the SAP R/3 system and its business intelligence tools, and action alerts giving him the status of key projects and sales.

Marketplace is a way SAP customers can use the mySAP.com website to build virtual business-to-business relationships, using a middle-ware engine developed by SAP in partnership with Palo Alto e-commerce specialist Tibco Software.

Mr Hayman compared SAP's performance in establishing on-line marketplaces with that of American company Oracle, which is marketing itself as the more internet-ready company as it tries to beat SAP into the top spot for enterprise applications sales.

Mr Hayman said Larry Ellison, Oracle's flamboyant chairman, was crowing that 268 companies were on Oracle's electronic marketplace.

"MySAP.com already has over 300 companies in the A to C section of its marketplace," he said.

That's lesson one of the internet age: "If you believe you have the dominant position today, you should not turn your back because things change so quickly."

The mySAP.com Marketplace promises to allow companies to communicate with multiple partners without building individual interfaces, so they can then do things such as supply-chain management, collaborative forecasting and auctions of goods and services.

This has meant a step away from the proprietary interfaces that have made SAP a closed and lucrative shop for systems integrators.

SAP's new Internet Business Framework uncouples the integration technology from the development language and run time, meaning a software module that calls a service need not be written in the same language as the service provider.

To help customers enter the new era, there are mySAP.com business scenarios, one-step templates that allow business-to-business and business-to-consumer solutions through SAP and third-party applications.

There is also a shift to web-based application hosting, so companies can rent the applications they need off the internet.

The application service provider concept has generated a lot of debate over the past few months, with some companies already offering applications on tap and others, especially telecommunications companies, trying to work out how to get into the business.

Just to show how it is done, SAP is spending about $12 million to create application hosting centres for tertiary institutes in Australia, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan. These will allow teachers and students to access a database of best-practice scenarios.

Mr Hayman wants to make SAP training cheaper and more accessible by offering on-line tuition, including getting the basic introductory course down to $29.95 - the price of a book.

The new environment is likely to mean some turbulence in SAP's earnings as many of the new products and services will be rented for fees based on the number of users, volume of transactions or complexity of the task being implemented.

In the first nine months of last year, the number of installations in the 13 countries of the Asia Pacific region rose 44 per cent, but revenue grew just 18 per cent.