“Although SAP will showcase some of its new Web technologies at
its developers’ and users’ shows during the next month, the
company’s late start has left some wondering whether it can catch
up with competitors in its Web integration efforts.”
“SAP dominates the market for business applications in today’s
client/server market, but the Internet is starting to transform how
business is done, who has access to information and can act on it,
and how applications are delivered.”
“In 1996, SAP began developing an “Internet-ready” architecture,
dividing up its enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, R/3, into
mix-and-match components and adding Web interfaces, according to
Gunther Tolkmit, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at
SAP. But customers were not interested in these new Internet
capacities then…”
“SAP first announced System mySAP.com in July. Its multi-faceted
Internet strategy includes e-commerce, online trading sites, an
information portal (mySAP.com), application hosting, and more
user-friendly graphical interfaces. It will rely on Extensible
Markup Language as a lingua franca to connect trading
partners.”