Features

CSA 2007: Enterprise Applications

DQI Bureau

28 Jan 2007 00:00 IST

New Update

The growing automation of Indian enterprises implies increasing
deployment of a plethora of enterprise applications. ERP, CRM and SCM
applications top the chart (CSA 2007 restricted to surveying only these three);
the lack of Indian product vendors implies that it is a field day for the likes
of the MNC vendors like SAP, Oracle or Microsoft. Indian CIOs repose faith in
these products not just for their reliability, performance and scalability, but
they also feel that they derive a better price-value parity from them. No wonder
these MNC vendors are falling over one another to penetrate the Indian market
further.

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Enterprise Applications Vendor Ranks
Brands	Rank '07	Rank '06	Change
SAP	1	2	^
Oracle	2	3	^
MS Business Solution	3	4	^
Ramco	4	1	v
^ Up v Down
This category saw a sharp fall in satisfaction, of 3.5 points. Last year's topper Ramco saw a nine-point drop in satisfaction, pushing it down four places, due to issues with 'vendor understanding and domain knowledge', and 'value received for price paid'

Most MNC vendors of
enterprise apps are ruling the roost with Indian CIOs. Reliability,
performance, scalability and security are key decision factors

Product reliability and performance, convenience in installation
and adoption as well as the scalability and security aspects of the product seem
to be the most important issues concerning enterprises. SAP and Oracle seem to
dominate on all these fronts while a local vendor like Ramco trips, especially
with respect to convenience in installation and adoption and scalability. CIOs
also seem to emphasize heavily on vendor responsiveness to their specific
requirements and their domain knowledge about their businesses.

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Enterprise Applications: The Top Two Parameters
Product	Industry	Microsoft Business solution/ Navision/ Axapta/ CRM	Oracle/ People Soft/ Siebel/ JD Edwards	Ramco	SAP
Product Reliability	88.0	85.0	86.0	82.9	91.1
Product Performance	85.4	83.3	87.5	81.4	86.7
Convenence in installation & adoption	83.0	82.1	84.2	74.3	83.6
Scalability	85.3	81.3	87.5	78.6	86.1
Security aspects of the product	85.8	83.8	86.9	80.0	86.4
Pre Sales Marketing
Responsiveness of the vendor to your specific requirement	85.6	81.7	82.4	80.0	88.1
Vendors understanding / Domain knowledge of your business	83.9	82.5	83.9	78.6	85.0
Note: The satisfaction scores are on a 100-point scale with 100 indicating the highest degree of satisfaction-very satisfied Base: 584 CIOs Product and pre-sales and marketing emerge as the two most important derivatives of satisfaction. It's a stiff competition between SAP and Oracle, the former marching ahead on the pre-sales and post-sales services front. The winner of last two years, Ramco disappoints by coming last on almost all counts

Enterprise Applications: Satisfaction Scores
	Industry	Microsoft Business solution/ Navision/ Axapta/ CRM	Oracle/ People Soft/ Siebel/ JD Edwards	Ramco	SAP
Product (100)	85.40	83.02	86.41	79.31	86.60
Pre Sales & Marketing (93)	84.65	82.13	83.27	79.20	86.34
Price & Commercial (88)	82.32	79.39	82.91	78.95	82.15
Delivery & Installation (85)	83.93	81.98	83.83	80.84	83.74
Post Sales Service (84)	83.09	80.42	82.78	79.76	84.27
Base: 584 CIOs
How satisfied are CIOs with their enterprise application vendors on five key parameters? The table lists scores derived from CIO responses to a range of questions. Figures in brackets indicate relative importance of the parameters as stated by respondents. Figures in blue represent the maximum and in red the minimum in each category

As expected, the BFSI and IT/BPO sectors are most discerning
about their application vendors; while BFSI CIOs are particularly choosy about
each and every facet of an application vendor, for the IT/BPO sectors maximum
emphasis is given to the product quality and issues involved in delivery and
installation. For the government and education sectors that are now witnessing
an avalanche of application deployment, responsiveness of the vendor to specific
problems and technical queries as well as timely delivery and installation count
very high on the priority list.

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Amongst MNCs, SAP seems to have pipped both Oracle and Microsoft
Business to the post on the CIO popularity chart, but it would be fair to
remember that unlike the German software maker, the latter two are offering a
plethora of solutions from multiple vendors following their acquisitions that
often cause integration-related teething problems. Oracle includes Peoplesoft,
Siebel and JD Edwards while MS Business includes Navision and Axapta.

'The
SAP Solution Manager and our Centers of Excellence are two of our
biggest USPs'

-Ambarish
Ojha, director, Active Global Support, SAP

What are the major customer service
initiatives from SAP for the Indian market?

Developing the SAP Solution Manager has been one of our key customer
service initiatives. The Solution Manager is a centralized solution
management platform that provides the tools, integrated content, and the
gateway to SAP that you need to implement, support, operate, and monitor
your SAP solutions. It helps to minimize risks and reduce total cost of
ownership. The SAP Solution Manager runs in your solution landscape and
facilitates the technical support of your distributed systems.

Also the setting up of the
Centers of Excellence around key focus areas has helped us meet unique
customer needs. SAP's CoEs provide support on a project basis to
assist SAP partners in developing prototypes and pilot solutions for
unique customer requirements.

How does the SAP Solution Manager
help?

The SAP Solution Manager enables CIOs to define and report service
levels, automate reporting across several systems in the solutions
landscape and provides a consolidated report containing the information
needed to make strategic IT decisions. The Solution Manager also makes
appropriate service recommendations and acts as a vehicle for delivering
SAP support services.

A new feature of the SAP
Solution Manager is the maintenance optimizer, which optimizes customers'
support processes, greatly reduces workload, and improves quality
assurance by planning and administering SAP software fixes, provided via
software packages.

The SAP Solution Manager
is of course closely related to SAP Safeguarding. The technical risk
management services that SAP Safeguarding provides on a project basis
helps ensure that the go-live phase and the run phase proceed without a
hitch, allowing companies to forecast and minimize a solution's total
cost.

Innovativeness, flexibility, and
optimum support for planning, operation, and continuous improvement are
undoubtedly important elements. What about total cost of ownership?

Naturally we are keen to minimize our customers' total cost of
ownership. The enterprise SOA blueprint enables companies to make
cost-effective process changes to meet market requirements. As you would
expect, our service and support offerings also reflect this cost-saving
strategy. Thus, our 5-1-2 maintenance strategy lets our customers
upgrade to a higher release after the mainstream maintenance phase has
passed and, therefore, reduce the total cost of their IT investment. Our
customized, scaled support options-SAP Standard Support, SAP Premium
Support, and SAP Max Attention-also help lower total cost of
ownership.

What are the customer service USPs
that differentiates SAP from competitors?

Obviously, as mentioned earlier, the SAP Solution Manager and our COEs
are two of our biggest USPs. Furthermore, with the SAP IT Excellence
program, SAP is delivering specific knowledge, methodologies, tools, and
services to help large enterprises gain maximum benefit from their
solutions during the run phase.

So we can safely say that
SAP is offering customers and partners an extensive portfolio of
solutions to provide them with the level of support they need to face
the challenges of the present and the future.

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