SAP Unveils A Flood Of New Enterprise OfferingsSAP Unveils A Flood Of New Enterprise Offerings

Seemingly aloof to the political and strategic maneuvers of its competitors, enterprise applications company SAP jammed the wires with product announcements Tuesday at its user conference in Orlando, Fla. Among the featured offerings were new products in the supply-chain and customer-relationship management arenas, as well as an enhanced partnership with IBM to service small and midsize companies.

Topping the news is a new release of mySAP CRM that offers enhanced analytics, marketing, sales, and service functionality. Most important is that the product has been customized to meet the specific needs of more than 15 vertical industries with new applications for each sector. For instance, mySAP for consumer-goods companies offers trade promotion management, which helps manage budgeting, branding strategy, and demand planning to get the most of trade promotions—a feature that integrates and shares data with SAP supply-chain, financial, and business-analytics apps. Meanwhile, SAP is offering the automotive industry CRM and vehicle-management features that let auto companies track and monitor areas such as customer information, business transactions, and vehicle life cycle for the duration of a vehicle's ownership. Auto manufacturers can use information such as the car's history to help prevent fraud, market to used car buyers, and manage spare-parts planning. Other industries getting special treatment include professional services, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, retail, and industrial machinery and components.

SAP also rolled out a new version of its supply-chain software. MySAP Supply Chain Management is designed to help companies in the discrete, process manufacturing, and consumer-products industries build collaborative, end-to-end supply chains that can be tied to CRM and other enterprise systems. The software includes more than 20 new processes and more than 30 process enhancements. It features SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization, SAP Event Management, and the new SAP Inventory Collaboration Hub, a Web-based module that lets companies and their key suppliers collaborate on inventory movement and replenishment needs via the Internet. The new version also provides visibility patterns (preconfigured and ready-to-deploy scenarios for key supply-chain processes) for procurement, fulfillment, and manufacturing processes through SAP Event Management.

And aiming at future expansion into new markets, SAP said it will expand its relationship with IBM to further target small and midsize companies. Under the partnership, SAP says it will develop a new version of its enterprise software for small businesses that will run on IBM's database software for the market; IBM will sell consulting services for midsize companies installing SAP apps.