Big Data. Big Decisions
 InformationWeek
Special Coverage Series

Commentary

Doug Henschen

Doug Henschen

Executive Editor, InformationWeek
See more from this author

SAP Cloud Platform, App Store Set For 2011

On-demand portfolio will also gain line-of-business extension applications and Business ByDesign For Subsidiaries.

By Doug Henschen InformationWeek
December 09, 2010 03:38 PM

Move over Salesforce.com. SAP will soon offer its own Platform as a Service and AppExchange-like online applications store.

These are the next big steps in SAP's on-demand push, and they will roll out in what the company describes as a deliberate fashion starting early next year. The plans were detailed Wednesday at SAP's Influencer Summit in Santa Clara, California.

At the center of SAP's burgeoning on-demand strategy is SAP Business ByDesign (BBD), the on-demand applications suite for managing financials, customer relationships, human resources, projects, procurement, and the supply chain. After years in development, including a significant rewrite that delayed general release by more than a year until July 2010, BBD is now ready to serve as the basis of a Platform as a Service (PaaS), SAP executives said.

The BBD-based PaaS will enable partners, customers and SAP itself, to develop and run on-demand applications that can stand alone or extend and tightly integrate with SAP's on-demand and on-premise applications.

The first step toward platform services will come in January with an upgrade release that will include a Business ByDesign Studio for developing applications. A software development kit is also in the works. SAP said it will gradually bring development partners on board and launch an online app store during the first half of 2011.

SAP's platform play comes as no surprise. The company has already developed SAP Carbon Impact OnDemand and SAP Sourcing OnDemand on the BBD platform. And this week executives offered a peek at coming Sales OnDemand (sales force automation) and Travel OnDemand (travel-expense reporting) applications set for release in the first half of 2011. A Career OnDemand (HR and talent management) app is expected in the second half of next year.

SAP is years behind Salesforce.com in delivering an on-demand platform and supporting infrastructure. More than 185,000 apps have been built on the CRM vendor's Force.com platform, and more than 700,000 instances of those apps have been installed from Salesforce.com's online AppExchange.

 1 | 2  | Next Page »
, join the conversation


Related Reading

News

Commentary

Most Popular

On the Web

Slideshow

Video

More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Webcasts

More >>


Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

BYTE encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, BYTE moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. BYTE further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.

Follow InformationWeek

By The Numbers

What Are Your Primary Concerns About Using Big Data Software?

Base: 417 respondents at organizations using or planning to deploy data analytics, BI or statistical analysis software
Data: InformationWeek 2013 Analytics, Business Intelligence and Information Management Survey of 541 business technology professionals, October 2012

What Do You Think?

What's your attitude about SQL analysis on top of Hadoop?
We want fast, standard SQL analysis capabilities on Hadoop ASAP
Hadoop is for unstructured data; SQL is for relational databases
We'll give SQL on Hadoop a try, but relational DBs will remain the mainstay
Given strong SQL support on Hadoop, we'd nix the data warehouse
We're not interested in Hadoop
No opinion



Related Content

From Our Sponsor

Five Big Data Challenges and How to Overcome Them with Visual Analytics

Five Big Data Challenges and How to Overcome Them with Visual Analytics

Business leaders often need a visual snapshot of data to quickly grasp and use it. This paper identifies five challenges in presenting data and how visual analytics can resolve them. Solutions are suggested to overcome the challenges of: speed, data clarity, data quality, displaying meaningful results, and dealing with outliers.

Game-Changing Analytics: How IT Executives Can Use Analytics to Create Innovation and Business Success

Game-Changing Analytics: How IT Executives Can Use Analytics to Create Innovation and Business Success

Today's competitive advantage requires a deeper understanding of your business, your market and your customers. As an IT executive, you can drive that knowledge transformation. In this white paper, learn how to make decisions as a strategic business leader and three steps to begin an analytics initiative within your enterprise.

Data Visualization Techniques: From Basics to Big Data with SAS Visual Analytics

Data Visualization Techniques: From Basics to Big Data with SAS Visual Analytics

High-performance data visualization turns sophisticated analyses into meaningful graphics, leading to faster and smarter decision making. In this white paper, learn how visual analytics can transform big data, with additional features such as real-time functionality, mobile compatibility, robust applications for technical groups and accessibility for nontechnical users.

Big Data: Lessons from the Leaders

Big Data: Lessons from the Leaders

Financial performance, competitive advantage, operational efficiency, strategic decision making - every business goal can extract value from big data, and the time for doubt or inaction has long passed. In this Economist Intelligence Unit report, in-depth interviews with data pioneers reveal the link between the effective use of big data and the bottom line among other results.

Decision-Driven Data Management: A Strategy for Better Decisions with Better Data

Decision-Driven Data Management: A Strategy for Better Decisions with Better Data

Which came first, the data or the decision? This white paper makes the case for having a decision in mind, then tailoring big data's volume, variety and velocity to achieve business results such as overcoming customer dissatisfaction or creating well-informed strategies in real time.

Informationweek Reports

Research: The Big Data Management Challenge

Research: The Big Data Management Challenge

The challenge of big data is real, but most organizations don't differentiate 'big data' from traditional data, and nearly 90% of respondents to our survey use conventional databases as the primary means of handling data. We'll help you understand what constitutes big data (it's not just size) and the numerous management challenges it poses.