Sap News & Articles

If Oracle’s (news, site) results for the third quarter are anything to go by, the IT sector may well have turned the corner on the recession. In figures released last night, profits for Q3 hit US $1.2 billion, with revenues up to US $6.4 billion from US $5.5 a year ago, beating analysts' forecast of US $6.3 billion.

Will we look back at 2010 as the year of mobile content management and collaboration? At least two market researchers think so. And to prove it, a number of companies are already in the game with tools that put enterprise collaboration platforms into information workers' pockets.

Quest Software (news, site) has made some updates to its ActiveRoles QuickConnect solution that will help you manage your SharePoint environments better. Oh, and it helps with your SAP environment as well.

Just recently, we reported on Nuxeo’s (news, site) steady progress with Apache Chemistry, a Java implementation of the CMIS spec.

The newest development on this front is OpenCMIS (a project led by Alfresco, SAP and Open Text) that is adding their collection of libraries, frameworks and tools around CMIS to Apache Chemistry.

No, it is *not* an attack against Chemistry, but more of a friendly merger.

And for the third course, SAP will also be serving Open Text’s (news, site) Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. Announced today, SAP and OTEX enter the third wave of the existing 20-year-long relationship by offering DAM as part of the global reseller agreement.

In its recent research, CMS Watch (news, site) found that enterprise search buyers are increasingly turning to specialized search vendors, as they struggle to find the right solution.

CMS Watch's Search & Information Access subscription service shows specialized focus in specific environments (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle) or verticals (e.g. Recommind in legal sector).

While evaluating 23 enterprise search vendors (10- to 18-page comparative evaluations per each), the researchers also found that:

• Despite improvements in SharePoint search, Microsoft-focused organizations are still considering other alternatives (Coveo, SurfRay or ISYS).
• Rapidly growing repositories are making enterprise search harder.
• Larger vendors struggle to keep up with specialized search vendors (Sinequa, dtSearch and Vivisimo), who are quickly releasing connectors to various repositories.

The updated Search & Information Access report also looks into FAST, SharePoint search in 2010, Autonomy’s IDOL platform, open source Apache Lucene and Solr, and offers an updated industry "cross-check" chart with 2010 product developments and vendor changes.

You can either get a free sample or buy the full report here.

“Imagine a virtual war room,” says SAP (news, site) of their upcoming potential Google Wave competitor. The private beta version of the cloud-based application (codenamed Constellation) is called 12Sprints, and promises to expedite the decision making process for business users with pre-defined tools.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Facebook Reaches 350 Million Users, Makes Privacy Changes
• Don't Fall For Phishing Scams on Social Networks
• Google Wave's New Competition Coming From SAP
• Twitter Teams Up To Launch SMS Advertising

Only six weeks after Open Text (news,  site) and SAP (news, site) extended their partnership to include a reseller agreement for the SAP Extended ECM application by Open Text, the two have decided to beef up retention management, compliance and CRM elements.

So it's day 2 of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 and what we have all been waiting for has happened. Microsoft has announced the beta release of SharePoint 2010 to the world.

A new OEM agreement between search applications company Endeca (news, site) and SAP (news, site) designed to improve enterprise-wide searches will result in the integration of SAP’s BusinessObject Intelligent Search software and Xcelsius visualization product into Endeca’s Information Access Platform (IAP).

Thanks to the integration of SAP’s Xcelsius and BusinessObjects Intelligence Search with IAP, users will be able to access information from multiple sources, including public web sources, and view it visually, whether the information is in response to it a simple business query, or a complex ‘what if’ scenario.

In addition to CA's release of GRC Manager 2.5, the world of GRC is chock-full of partnerships and inquiries.

What’s a pretty big deal for Open Text (news, site), is a pretty big deal for SAP (news, site) as well. The two, after much courting in the past, have signed yet another extension of the global reseller agreement. In a nutshell, SAP will now be able to resell Open Text Enterprise CMS under SAP branding.

This is the second major expansion of the original reseller agreement between SAP and OTEX. Let’s not forget that SAP is already reselling Open Text’s Document Access and Archiving and Invoice Management products.

The new, reseller-inspired name is the SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management (SAP Extended ECM) application by Open Text.

Open Text didn’t fail to mention that the industry analysts SAP has briefed find this reseller agreement expansion a “game-changing” event for the ECM market from the point of view of how ECM is sold.

So, instead of playing the add-ons game, ECM “becomes integral to how the company operates.” Both companies are guided by the principle of helping customers to “increase business value with content-enriched business processes.”

“By working closely with SAP, we are able to give customers a way to manage all their vital information in a secure… way… We are entering into a new phase in the evolution of content management technology,” said John Shackleton, president and chief executive officer of Open Text.

When IBM (news, site) announced that they had come to an agreement on the terms of a deal that would see IBM buy out predictive analytics company SPSS for US$ 1.2 billion, some commentators suggested that there was still time for a competing bid.

However, at the close of business last Friday, SPSS announced that it had called a special meeting of shareholders for October 2, for what will be a definitive vote on the US$ 50 a share deal.

The Open Text Web Solutions group, formerly known as RedDot Web Content Management (WCM), has just put out a new and significant release of their mid-range Web CMS product. Yes, Vignette (when the acquisition is finalized) will take place alongside Web Solutions version 10 in this WCM quilt.

This update brings improvements to the technology stack, more Enterprise CMS and SAP integration patchwork and an updated user interface. But OTEX (news, site) didn’t stop there. Let's see what else they've done.