Sap News & Articles

It’s been a mixed bag this week. Amazon has released an application that lets users send documents to Kindle, the CloudOn app enables users to create and edit Office documents on iPad, SAP expands in the education market, PSIGEN pushes into Asia Pacific while Due Diligence extends the scope of V-Rooms.

With billions of social media posts across millions of sites globally, Social Web nirvana doesn't come easy, particularly for the enterprise looking to extract structured insights and meaningful metrics to understand market needs and spot emerging trends.

Germany based Enterprise Software giant SAP gets it, and to help its customers tap into the pulse of the social web the company announced a partnership with Netbase and its natural language processing (NLP) engine to read and categorize social media posts.

As in previous years, this week's SAP Sapphire conference has generated a number of interesting releases this week in the GRC space. Jive offered enterprises a way of keeping their social media compliant, while Krolls provided them the tools to DIY e-Discovery and C2C has simplified email archiving.

If you haven’t got your Christmas shopping done yet, there’s a pile of new document management software that’s worth a look. SAP and OpenText have upgraded NetWeaver, Microsoft and Nokia have new apps for Symbian, Version One goes to R2.2, KnowledgeTree releases ExplorerCP and SmartVault has a new service update.

Box.net is gearing up to take on bigger players in the enterprise software market. Having recently raised US$ 48 million earlier this year, the cloud storage platform startup has recently updated this Series D financing round with US$ 81 million from Salesforce.com and SAP, with Bessemer Venture Partners and NEA contributing to the round.

Oracle’s OpenWorld has finally kicked off with the customary keynote from CEO Larry Ellison. Leaving aside the fact that many are saying this was his worst keynote ever, for those in enterprise computing the launch of the Exalytics analytics appliance is the one most will be watching.

If the hype is to be believed, platform-as-a-service is going to be massive in the not-too-distant future and SAP is partnering with MongoDB to drive its offering in the market.

Dreamforce starts today… and it feels like Groundhog Day. Not the groundhog that tells the weather, but groundhog in the way things keep repeating themselves. The repetition this time is in the shape of Microsoft’s offer of rebates of US$ 150-per-seat for customers who subscribe to Dynamics CRM online.

This week, after announcing its release in March, SAP has put BusinessObjects 10 GRC on general release, Google gets some more security certification, BMC offers cloud Lifecycle Management to mitigate the risks associated with cloud computing outages, and Hostway offers email encryption.

You get the impression sometimes that OpenText (news, site) and SAP (news, site) make so many agreements at both a business and technology level that they should just merge and get it over with. The latest agreement is one that will enable the SAP Travel Management application to work with a receipts management solution that OpenText has released.

SAP (news, site) announced that it is partnering with Google (news, site) to allow customers to create geographic visualizations of business information stored in SAP’s analytics software using Google Map, Earth and Street View.

It’s taken a couple of weeks to get it, but Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the GRC space is finally out. Leaving aside the list of vendors that made it into the "'Leaders' quadrant," Gartner says that over the course of this year, the market shifted from a tactical focus on regulatory compliance to a wider focus on enterprise risk management.

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If SAP (news, site) has given the impression in recent years that it is slow in getting to market or responding to change, the announcements that it will be moving some of its products to the Amazon EC2 cloud and that it is facilitating deeper integration between SAP and Microsoft cloud computing technologies should go some way to improving that image.

Anyone who watches these things will know that high-end software is a tough, dirty business and not for the faint of heart, and Larry Ellison knows that better than most. So it will interesting to see how he reacts to IBM’s (news, site) new financial incentives to companies that want to move up from Oracle to IBM.