Sap News & Articles

It started at Dries Buytaert's DrupalCon 2011 keynote. In this case, the "shot heard 'round the world" was a pair of words that he seemed to know would cause mixed reactions from the crowd: App store. This wasn't a product announcement, but so far throughout the conference, the term won't seem to die.

A final look at SAP’s (news, site) Hanover CeBit show that has finished this week comes from the Sales OnDemand application, due to be put on general release  by the middle of the year -- and which might be able to give Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics a good run for their money.

This week, we had to look at Apple’s promised preferential iPad2 deal for SMBs, SAP sets itself up as a competitor to Salesforce in the SMB space, SMSs for customer relationship get an airing with Clickatell and Siemens offers a UC package for SMBs.

With a scheduled release of 2010, SAP (news, site) has finally announced the ramped-up version of its updated business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information management (EIM) solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 portfolio.

Over the past 12 months, there has been a lot of movement in the business intelligence market from both established vendors and new entrants, making it difficult to distinguish old trends and future possibilities.

Gartner, however, has released its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence, in which a number of themes have become a lot clearer. Over the coming years, Gartner said, ease-of-use, complexity of analysis, scale and performance, and total cost of ownership will continue to dominate BI market requirements.

This week SAP has upgraded its Business ByDesign software enabling easier customization, both Microsoft and Drobo have released products for the SMB storage market, Blue Coat offers cloud-based security, and we take a look at SharePoint alternatives for SMBs.

Microsoft and SAP have finally released the polished version of their recent joint Duet program that ties SAP (news, site) software with Microsoft (news, site) applications. In 2005, when the project was originally launched they tied Office with SAP’s enterprise resourced planning software, this time they tie SAP and SharePoint 2010.

This week, once again, security is a top priority. AT&T teams up with McAfee to offer more security for mobile data access, SAP buys single log-in technology, OpenText and SharePoint get DoD 5015.02 certification, while Digital Reef and Exeterro team up for legal hold and information management.

Ending the year in the SMB space -- Aspect and Microsoft Lync join together to provide communication center capabilities for SMBs, SAP continues its move into the SMB market, Websense warns of threats for 2011 and Alfresco Community Edition goes multi-lingual.

There probably isn’t a whole lot of mileage in reporting that Oracle (news, site) has just released its Q1 figures, which show that it made buckets of cash again. ‘Buckets’ might be a tad vague, so just for the record, revenue grew 47% to US$ 8.6 billion with net income growing 28% to US$ 1.9 billion.

OpenText (news, site) and SAP (news, site) -- who announced the release of Extended ECM just over a year ago -- have now announced the release of a number of upgrades to Extended that focus on enterprise collaboration and tighter integration between SAP applications and the ECM.

Google (news, site) adds another big name in SAP to its catalogue with the addition of a stream-powered collaboration tool.

Mobile business intelligence vendor DSPanel has just added an iPad application to their already extensive range of BI products. As part of the company’s Performance Canvas mobile analytics products, the new functionality enables users access to their analytics, including data visualization through the Safari browser.

Businesses are going green. Companies are constructing energy-efficient buildings. Fleets are switching to electric vehicles. Offices are switching from incandescent to fluorescent light bulbs. Computing for energy use and efficiency is not exactly a science that anyone can just learn overnight. There is a need to manage energy needs and expenditures in order to know how to do things more efficiently. This is where Enterprise Energy Management Systems will come in.

Only four days before SAP and Oracle were to meet in an Oakland courtroom concerning a case brought by Oracle against SAP over copyright infringements, SAP has admitted contributory liability. The latest filing is a dramatic change from its previous position where it admitted wrongdoing by its subsidiary, TomorrowNow, but not by SAP itself.