You have to admire SAP’s determination to run down every potential revenue source, even if it is driven by necessity as much as desire.
This week’s TechEd event has so far provided news of Financials OnDemand – a HANA-based cloud alternative to SAP’s on premise financials that is available in 8 countries, including the UK. It is not clear whether this is different to the Business ByDesign financials component or is part of the work to break open the suite but it is designed to provide another tap into the industry wide SaaS revenue stream. It will also be an attempt to thwart the rising threat from Workday who has extended out from its HR core and into financials (see here).
The German giant also announced additions to HANA to enable transactional and analytical applications to run in one platform. It lays the groundwork for SAP’s mainstream ERP suite to run on HANA - announcements are expected early next year – and to entice customers away from Oracle and IBM databases.
There have also been two new social offerings: SAP Jam and the SAP Social OnDemand solution, which tap into this emerging sector and revenue vein. It is becoming apparent that vendors need a social platform to maintain credibility (see Process and purpose: drivers for enterprise social platform adoption).
And there was heavy endorsement of Windows 8 (but not the feature-limited RT version), with news of six upcoming mobile applications that take advantage of the touchscreen capabilities; the announcement of SAP Mobile Platform support for the development of custom applications in HTML5 or JavaScript using Visual Studio for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8; and that SAP Afaria mobile device management is now available for Windows 8 tablets (and other devices running Intel Atom and Core processors).
SAP has a hard task because it is not a leader in these fields. It has little or no advantage over competitors in some areas and is disadvantaged in others – it is breaking into databases, coming from behind in cloud, competing across the board with social, and acquired its way into mobile (although it has gained a strong position here). Still, the potential of revenue from lots of plays is a safer bet than relying on one major initiative and it cannot afford to not participate.