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Author: David Bradshaw
6 December 2006
Yesterday at the SAP analyst summit in Las Vegas, SAP revealed a radical update to its mid-market All-in-One product. Based on SAP's enterprise services architecture and the NetWeaver business process platform, the new All-in-One will be initially offered as a hosted service only. It will offer a range of back office (including ERP) and front office (CRM) capabilities.
Comment: This is exactly the right thing for SAP to do for the mid market. This is one of the ways that it will make its target of getting 50% of its future revenue from new products.
Each customer will have their own instance of the software running on a separate server 'blade', with a separate database for storage of their data. SAP will maintain the software directly, fixing bugs and providing updates without taking the system down. Customers will configure rather than customise the software - and it will be shipped with a choice of pre-configured industry business models that the customer can select as a starting point for further configuration. If configuration is not enough they can write extensions and integrate through web services.
This was just a preview and some key elements have yet to be finalised, including the user interface (though SAP was showing a working mobile interface on what looked like a Blackberry) and the commercial terms. The latter may be a lot trickier than the development of user interface.
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