SAP & SAPPHIRE: The saga continues

Despite the slowdown in the industry, SAP AG, a leading provider of

e-business software solutions, welcomed customers from across Asia Pacific to

SAPPHIRE ’01 at Brisbane. The fourth SAPPHIRE in Brisbane, held from November

18 to 21, 2001, attracted nearly 2,000 delegates from 25 countries across the

entire Asia Pacific region. A total of 380 organizations and 63 exhibition

partners participated in this mammoth three day event held at the Brisbane

Convention Center located at the picturesque South Bank Parklands on the right

bank of the Brisbane river which meanders through this entire city inhabited by

12 lakh people.

On October 18, SAP reported that the first three-quarters have yielded a 23%

growth in revenue in two key areas. Revenues of mySAP Supply Chain Management (SCM)

are up by 46% and mySAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by 55%. SCM is

now 22% of total revenue and CRM accounts for 17% of total software license

sales. Additional revenue streams also saw considerable growth with consulting

revenues growing 34% and training yielding a 20% rise on 2000. Across the global

scene, SAP saw revenues of 1,649 Euros for the third quarter of 2001. Of this,

50% came from EMEA, 37% from the Americas and 11 percent from Asia Pacific.

Given the chaotic business environment, SAP is reporting healthy figures and an

extended customer list in key industry sectors. "Business unusual- is the

best way to sum up our current economic climate but even against this tide, we

have continued to succeed in a difficult year because we have set the right

strategy and our customers recognize that. In this uncertainty, SAP’s strength

and commitment to deliver continually improving business value to our customers,

will see us and our customers ride the storm," said Les Hayman, President,

and CEO (Asia Pacific), SAP.

The mySAP.com strategy is proving sound as mySAP.com accounts for 50% of the

overall revenue base. This year’s introduction of the latest version of mySAP

CRM has been welcomed by experts with plaudits and a Hurwitz Group report stated

that the latest version means, "We may be seeing the birth of a new leader

in CRM." Indeed, Lehman Brothers reported in August this year that they

believed "this release is equivalent to the release of the supply chain

management solution that was launched in February that catapulted them into the

number-one position over a short six month period."

In August, a Gartner report on mySAP SCM stated that the solution offers

"robust functionality and compelling value. SAP has developed a wide suite

of assets and has more depth than i2 Technologies." More importantly

however, the report goes on to say that mySAP SCM, "has an even larger

value proposition for enterprise process integration agility in combination with

other product lines, such as SAP Portal, marketplace infrastructure using SAP

Markets, analytics using SAP Business Warehouse and product data from SAP

Product LifeCycle Management."

Globally, SAP claims to have more than doubled its CRM customer base since

January 2001. Of its CRM sites around the world, 30 are in Asia and 15 of those

in Australia and New Zealand. As the new version of mySAP CRM begins to ship,

SAP Asia has already been able to announce the adoption of the latest solution

by such organizations as: Cheil Jedang (Korea), Yodabashi (Japan) and Yageo

(Taiwan). Prior to this new release, mySAP CRM projects which have gone live in

Asia Pacific include FAW-Volkswagen (China), LG Chemical (Korea) City

Developments (Singapore) and Siam City Cement (Thailand). Customers like Cadbury

and Asian Paints (India) are using mySAP Business Intelligence to analyze

customer data.

Some of the customers who have selected mySAP CRM include Samsung Electronics

(Korea), LG Siltron (Korea), Ayala Land (Philippines), San Miguel (Philippines),

Tata Infomedia (India), MIRC Electronics (India), and DCM Shriram Consolidated

(India).

The company has delivered more than 2,000 shipments of mySAP SCM to global

companies. In Asia Pacific, companies who have selected mySAP SCM include Hansol

CSN (Korea), Cheil Jedang (Korea), Pacific (Korea), Marico Industries (India),

HP Far East (Singapore), Unilever (Singapore) and Yageo Corporation (Taiwan). In

the region, some leading companies like Korean Broadcasting Corporation (Korea),

Inzi Controls (Korea), Shanghai General Motors Corporation, (China) and

Schneider Electric (Singapore) are implementing mySAP PLM.

"What we are seeing is the culmination of a long process of consultation

with our customer base to deliver the right solutions to today’s business

problems. Customers have said they want seamless integration across all their

business processes, effective use of the Internet and mobile deployment. With

over 50 mySAP.com customers in Australia and New Zealand, we have delivered

that, and all the indicators show we have got it right," said Chris

Bennett, MD and CEO (Australia and New Zealand), SAP adding, "Our success

proves that when companies need solutions that deliver real value, they turn to

SAP. We are now number one for CRM in our customer base - this was our first

goal to success in the CRM market. SAP is heading in the same direction for the

Portals and SCM spaces."

SAP has been ranked the undisputed leader of the portal space ahead of its

competitors by Gartner in its Magic Quadrant report this year.

Asim Raina/CNS in Brisbane

SAPPHIRE Sidelights

SAPPHIRE, SAP’s annual

event for users as well as partners, was held at the Brisbane Convention

& Exhibition Center, located at the picturous South Bank Parklands on

the right bank of the Brisbane river. The event attracted nearly 2,000

delegates from 25 countries across the entire Asia Pacific region. In all,

380 organizations and 63 exhibition partners participated in this mammoth

three day event.

Not surprisingly, considering the

importance attached to the Indian market by all the IT vendors, the number

of Indians at the event were probably just after Australians. There were a

total of 35 partners (from E&Y, L&T Infotech, Mahindra Consulting,

PWC, SISL, Tata Technologies, etc) and 25 customers (from Bharat

Petroleum, Marico Industries, ONGC, Reliance Industries, Tisco, etc).

There were more than 70 people who had flown in from India to take part in

this annual event.

And when there is an event of this

magnitude, there always are a number of sidelights that keep the interest

level high amongst the participants.

• While going from the hotel to the
  
  convention center in a cab, the cabbie casually enquired about the
  
  name of the event. When told that it is called SAPPHIRE, his instant
  
  reaction was "oh, so it is a jewelry exhibition; how nice."
• The reception held in the evening of
  
  the opening day of the event saw a big and very violent storm lashing
  
  Brisbane. This lead to some people speculating whether Oracle–which
  
  competes with SAP in the marketplace–had any hand in the same.
• Oracle, which also is a SAP’s
  
  partner as far as databases go, seemed to have a much larger presence
  
  in the event. In fact, at times it was difficult to decide whether it
  
  was a SAP event or an Oracle event.
• On one of the days, Oracle sponsored
  
  the lunch for all the delegates, where nice and snazzy mugs in black
  
  with Oracle written boldly in red were handed out by the dozens. And
  
  all the delegates were lapping it up.
• At its booth on the exhibition floor,
  
  Oracle had a nice contest going where four Casio wrist cameras were
  
  being offered as prizes. In addition, all the visitors were given a
  
  nice bag with Oracle written in big bold letters and the SAPPHIRE logo
  
  relegated to one of the bottom corners in small print.
• Oracle also used the event to promote
  
  its iDevelop seminar, which was scheduled to be held on December 11 in
  
  Sydney. Quite a few delegates were seen signing up for the same.
• During the entire duration of the
  
  event, Oracle had hired a couple of big trucks, which kept on going
  
  round-and-round the convention center. Both the sides of the trucks
  
  carried a big hoarding that said "Oracle runs better than IBM on
  
  SAP".
• Perhaps the longest queue was seen at
  
  the Citrix booth where red wine was being doled out to anybody who
  
  could scoop up a small red ball from a small container. Blue balls
  
  fetched a shirt and if you got the green ball, you had to rest content
  
  with a small toy.
• On one corner of the exhibition floor
  
  was the press center. Interestingly, the press center was made
  
  functional only after the keynote address was over on the opening day.
  
  Unlike the press centers at other such events, this one had around 15
  
  IBM notebooks on which the journos could file their stories.