SAP revs up BI, CRM at Sapphire

Continuing its push past ERP, SAP unveiled a plethora of enhancements to its newest application suite, mySAP CRM, at its annual customer gala in Boston, Saphire 05. In addition, SAP rolled out a new hardware appliance to support its NetWeaver integration platform.

SAP also announced an agreement with EMC to manage corporate information on the NetWeaver platform.

Developed with partners Hewlett-Packard and Intel, SAP’s low-cost appliance aims to improve performance and give business analysts more flexibility in building or changing data models on the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence suite.

The NetWeaver appliance can run numerous ad hoc queries against high volumes of data while maintaining a high level of performance, said Lothar Schubert, director of solutions marketing at SAP NetWeaver.

The appliance does not use a database. The software is borrowed from search engines using “parallel memory processing, smart compression, and vertical decomposition,” Schubert said.

The procedures search billions of records using indexes residing in memory rather than on disk or in a database, which speeds up performance, Schubert said.

“Usually you have great performance or flexibility, not both,” Schubert said.

The other major announcement made at the show was the introduction of mySAP CRM 2005. The new version delivers dozens of vertical and cross-industry features.

One feature gives financial services organizations real-time collaborative capabilities for managing customer loans across departments and credit bureaus. Among the new cross-industry features in mySAP CRM 2005 is mobile access to sales data from a handheld device.

Three years ago no one knew SAP had a CRM solution, said Mary Wardley, vice president of CRM applications at IDC.

The vertical push shows that SAP is not scaling back its development and has every intention of competing directly with CRM giant, Siebel. “They are doing what it takes to get beyond their own given markets,” Wardley said.

Laurent Pacalin, vice president and general manager for Siebel CRM, said Siebel is not encumbered by having to also support ERP apps. Pacalin said many Fortune 1,000 companies have picked Siebel “because there are specific and critical areas of CRM, like pricing management, that SAP doesn’t touch,” she said.

Finally, EMC and SAP are extending their partnership to help companies use ILM (information lifecycle management) applications on SAP’s SOA architecture.

SAP argues that the NetWeaver appliance is a more efficient way to manage an IT environment based on an an SOA,  said Josh Greenbaum, chief analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting. “The world is more about blending processes and interactions, not making one [application] better than the other,” he said.