SAP Takes On Salesforce.com With Sales OnDemandSAP Takes On Salesforce.com With Sales OnDemand

SAP is expanding its cloud offerings and aiming squarely at competitor Salesforce.com with Tuesday's unveiling of SAP Sales OnDemand for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

The software, on display at the CeBIT 2011 digital IT and telecommunications trade show in Hanover, Germany, was designed to help sales professionals collaborate on opportunities, let them manage customer information more efficiently, and improve communication using a Facebook-like, social media interface, SAP said.

Expected to become available next quarter, the software is based on SAP Business ByDesign, a business management application for SMBs that enables preconfigured best practices for managing financials, customer relationships, human resources, projects, procurement, and the supply chain, according to the developer. It is cloud-based software, where customers rely on SAP for installation, maintenance, and upgrades.

"SalesOD -- new design criteria: focus on people and collaboration, not on enterprise first," said Sven Denecken, VP of product management and head of co-innovation, in a tweet. "Customer reality is hybrid environment... Need [to] connect OnPremise and OD seamlessly... SalesOD first of many services."

The company also will simultaneously offer native mobile support for smartphones including Android devices, iPhones, iPads, and Research in Motion BlackBerrys, IDG reported.

"Customer co-innovation, together with agile development practices, allows SAP to develop more quickly and with greater certainty that we are meeting real customer business requirements," said John Wookey, executive VP of SAP's On Demand line of business, in a statement. "This is particularly important as we seek to address this new business area, in which every person, however involved in supporting and meeting sales and business objectives, is our intended user. With these new solutions SAP is responding to the way in which people work together today to solve business problems -- anytime, anywhere." SAP is targeting other specific lines of business with its most recent and upcoming on-demand applications. Later this year, for example, SAP plans to roll out a program designed to help SMBs optimize expense management by helping employees control costs, gain visibility into travel expenditures, and meet regulatory requirements, the company said. Another application will help human resource managers support employee performance management, development, and career planning, the developer said.

Currently, SAP offers line-of-business on-demand software such as SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand and an upgrade of SAP Sourcing OnDemand.

The next version of SAP Sourcing OnDemand -- wave 8 -- should become generally available before the end of this quarter, SAP said. The software was designed to help customers see into the sourcing process in order to get greater control, cut costs, and improved visibility, the developer said. In addition, companies can tailor sourcing and contracting processes to meet their specific business needs using the software's built-in support for best practices, training, user and supplier support, and sourcing enablement services, according to SAP.

All SAP's OnDemand family will integrate with customers' SAP Business Suite applications, the developer said. The suite consists of customer relationship management (CRM); enterprise resource planning (ERP); product lifecycle management; supply chain management; and supplier relationship management.

"SAP sees its job as one where it melds those two worlds as seamlessly as possible while recognizing that the notion of process centricity is being augmented by placing people at the center of how applications are used and consumed. That's far more than a UI makeover. It is a fundamental shift in the way applications are designed," wrote analyst Dennis Howlett on a Constellation Research blog in December 2010.

"Salesforce on the other hand is not handling a single business critical process. Shocked? Go figure. It is parsing pieces of the pie but it cannot legitimately claim ownership of entire processes. For that it needs its partners like FinancialForce, Appirio, and Workday on the apps side to get to a whole view of the transaction," Howlett said. "Add it all up and Salesforce is no longer a cheap option for sales force automation alone but a premium offering that needs the same close attention to cost detail as any SAP quotation."

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