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Technology Stocks : SAP A.G. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ibexx who wrote (895)	5/11/1998 7:17:00 PM
From: Jay8088	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 3424

A good news! I have read that SAP has an R&D budget amounting to 20% of its annual revenue and that fully 25% of its employees are involved in research. The speed of their product roll outs has been pretty impressive. I sure hope this data warehouse software would eat into Oracle's market. Best wishes. P.S. (off-topic) What do you make of all these Y2K doomsayers?

To: Ibexx who wrote (895)	5/12/1998 7:39:00 PM
From: Ibexx	Respond to of 3424

Thread, From InfoWorld: ______ SAP targets smaller operations with compact modules By Stannie Holt InfoWorld Electric Posted at 8:18 AM PT, May 12, 1998 Acknowledging that some users have trouble installing its huge suite, enterprise resource planning (ERP) giant SAP is offering pre-configured, scaled-down packages for particular functions and industries. The company hopes the SAP Accelerated Solutions will appeal to small and mid-size organizations that want to automate faster or have small IT staffs. The first horizontal Accelerated Solution -- Accelerated Financials -- is available immediately. The first industry-specific solution will be Accelerated Automotive, which SAP officials said will ship to early customers in the third quarter and will be made generally available by the end of the year. More applications will follow through 1999, company officials said. Prices were not available. Both of the current Accelerated Solutions include a pre-configured client that uses the most common U.S. or Canadian settings for SAP's flagship R/3 suite; Accelerated SAP (ASAP), an implementation road map that draws on practices of previous SAP customers; and Ready-to-Run R/3, a pre-configured package of software, operating system, and database. The modules focus on specific needs, such as repetitive manufacturing, customer demand management, shipping control, and standard container specifications for the automotive package. Accelerated Solutions addresses SAP's image problem, said Bruce Bond, a research director at the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn. Although SAP is considered "the Ferrari of the marketplace," smaller companies may think it's too big, complex, and time-consuming to install on their limited IT budgets. "This definitely makes things easier," Bond said. It also helps SAP find more customers in the mid-market now that most of the Fortune 500 companies it targeted have become automated, Bond added. Analyst David Dobrin, a research director for ERP applications with Benchmarking Partners in Cambridge, Mass., agreed that the Accelerated Solutions templates and pre-configured packages will make implementation easier for smaller users that can't or don't want to do all the work. However, there's no evidence that ASAP has shortened implementation times; moreover, shorter implementations aren't always better, Dobrin added. "The real issue of implementation is the kind of benefits you want to get out of [ERP]," which often involve redesigning business processes, Dobrin said. If you rush, "you're not taking advantage of things the software can do for you." ____ Ibexx