Sapphire: What is SAP’s strategy?

Posted on May 9, 2008.

Third day in Orlando, most of them had an anxiety as to what is SAP’s strategic direction, as in what is SAP going to develop further that would benefit me? Jim Shepherd from AMR research E2s at least had calculated prediction as to what could be expected from SAP till 2013. Here is a briefing of his views:

SAP would spend most of the time in aligning the release schedule and shipping enhanced packages for the Business suite. Due to the sync effort of SAP ERP 6.0 and Netweaver 7.0, it would continue to have a mainstream maintenance till 2013 and extend it further by 3 years
The Growth strategy for SAP is to increase account penetration.
The Platform that SAP application’s run on is NetWeaver. The advantages of using NetWeaver is that when a customer buys it to run SAP application, he could use it for a whole lot more.
SAP wants to expand into new industries, creating an advantage for the customer who fall outside SAP’s normal comfort zone.
SAP is planning to accommodate Software as a service(SaaS) paradigm with Business ByDesign, which is now delayed cuz of the compatibility issues with NetWeaver 7.1. However, market can expect this product for the SME sector.