SAPPHIRE IN THE NEWS

Media coverage of SAPPHIRE 2008

• Bank of Ireland Standardizes Business Intelligence (vnunet.com – May 21, 2008)
  Bank of Ireland has signed a deal with supplier Business Objects to implement business intelligence tools across the company, several U.K. media, including IT Week and Computer Reseller News, report. The bank hopes to respond more quickly to market changes by using the new system to analyse information more easily and distribute that data throughout the firm. The BI system will interface with Bank of Ireland's existing SAP application. "As our bank continues to grow, we need complete visibility into our business performance," said Vincent Lattimore, manager of IT procurement services. See the full article



• SAP Denies Reducing SaaS Investment (ZDNet – May 20, 2008)
  SAP is dismissing any notion that it is scaling back on plans to become a key software-as-a-service (SaaS) player. Asked about the company's plans for this market during a press meeting on Monday at the SAPPHIRE 2008 conference in Berlin , co -chief executive Léo Apotheker said: "Let's start by getting some facts straight. No one is reducing any investment…The decision we made very recently is to continue investing in Business ByDesign, but to take out that acceleration part and do it in the normal speed that we had planned originally. Therefore, we continue to invest significant resources, just not the accelerated part." Apotheker also noted that SAP will be continuing the rollout of Business ByDesign in six countries: Germany , the UK , France , the US , China and India , where current early adopters of the on-demand suite are located. See the full article



• The Customer Is King (Computing – May 20, 2008)
  Day two at SAPPHIRE involved many speeches by high-profile customers. John Clarke, chief information officer at Nokia, talked about the challenges of producing more than 300 million mobile phones every year in what has become one of the most diverse, demanding and rapidly changing markets in the world . Clarke's presentation highlighted again the benefit of ruthless standardization – driving a global company through an adherence to a single standard version of its core business application. That was echoed by the second customer speaker of the day – Paul McGarry, international vice president of global IT for manufacturing giant Colgate-Palmolive. McGarry said that 99.6 percent of the company runs on SAP, and highlighted the most important benefit as "taking complexity out of our IT." See the full article



• How To Kraft a Successful Software Upgrade (Computing – May 20, 2008)
  Kraft Foods is one of SAP's very biggest customers, with 12,000 users in Europe, 30,000 more in North America by 2010, Asia Pacific to follow later , and with the software in use since 2001. Kraft used to have disparate systems in every country in Europe , but was very much an early mover in adopting a single, standard, unmodified version of SAP across the continent. One of the great benefits of this was realized in October last year. The firm wanted to upgrade to the latest release of SAP to take advantage of new functionality. The cost and complexity of such a project is what has historically kept too many organization stuck on older versions of applications, with a system update taking on all the characteristics of a total re-implementation. But for Kraft, the decision to standardize paid off – the entire upgraded system was built remotely, offsite, and implemented in just three months. See the full article



• SOA Service and Support Offering (ComputerWeekly – May 20, 2008)
  SAP has unveiled a new SOA (service orientated architecture) service and support offering for firms. The new portfolio includes Starter Kit for Enterprise SOA – step-by-step guidance for initial SOA projects with knowledge building blocks, including content focused on value and benefits, architecture, governance, composition of services and ongoing operations. There are also Packaged Composite Implementations – providing customers with value-add SOA offerings that address specific business problems, and value prototyping, which provide a high-speed collaboration platform to create custom-tailored prototypes. See the full article



• French Companies Show Way in SAP Quality Awards (Computerworld – May 20, 2008)
  French companies led the way in the SAP Quality Awards that were presented Tuesday at SAPPHIRE. Bouygues Construction won the global implementation award and EDF, the energy company, won the new solutions category. Other winners were Standard Bank of South Africa in the large company sector and the UK-based project management company Davis Langdon in the SME category. The hallmark of all the winners was that they understood that delivering quality involved more than simply having highly effective project management, said Sven Lembke, who leads the SAP Quality Program in Europe . Effective quality required collaboration – from the CEO to the end users, methodology and feedback mechanisms that ensured issues were identified early and rectified rapidly. See the full article



• Met Police Aims for Arresting Results with SAP (Computer Business Review – May 19, 2008)
  SAP has announced that it has been selected by London's Metropolitan Police Service as its corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) service. The organization is aiming to improve operational efficiency from existing resources. The company says that following a thorough evaluation of providers, the Met Police chose SAP because it is aiming to exploit the capabilities of its evolving SAP environment to the fullest, supporting its aim to deliver improved services and public value for the citizens and visitors of London. The Met Police will use the software to support frontline policing as well as utilizing its supporting capabilities... See the full article



• SAP Touts "Collaborative" SOA (Silicon.com – May 19, 2008)
  SAP says collaborative working through service oriented architecture (SOA) technology represents the future for businesses. Speaking at the opening day of SAP's Sapphire conference in Berlin, SAP co-CEO Henning Kagermann said collaboration is the "most important market transition going on in business". And he added SOA has an important part to play in this. "The entry ticket to manage these networks is SOA. It makes you network ready," he said, and added, "It's about connecting systems. We have to move out of our comfort zone and manage these networks collaboratively."... See the full article



• SAP Gets Order From Daimler, Adding 35,000 New Users (Bloomberg – May 19, 2008)
  SAP AG, the world's biggest maker of business-management software, said it received an order from Daimler AG which will boost the number of SAP users at the carmaker to more than 100,000 from 65,000. See the full article



• SAP Chief Says U.S. Market `Tough, But Not Worsening' (Bloomberg – May 18, 2008)
  Several newswires reported on a media round table on the eve of SAPPHIRE in Berlin. With regards to the U.S. market environment Kagermann said it "is tough, but not worsening." However, SAP generates only 30 percent to 35 percent of its sales in North America – compared to competitors generating more than half of their business there – and "Europe and Asia are still strong." Speaking of the integration of Business Objects, Co-CEO Leo Apotheker said it "is performing in a very satisfactory manner" and that SAP will be done before the end of the year. The overall strategy remains to grow organically. SAP will communicate its vision for the time beyond 2010 in 2009... See the full article

See the media coverage from SAPPHIRE 2008 Orlando