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SAP expands reach of app store, looks to improve reviews - Techworld.com

Posted: 13 May 2013 01:43 AM PDT

You know you're not in iTunes anymore when the app you're eyeing has a $1,050 price tag, but SAP is nonetheless expanding its online shopping experience in a bid to entice its customers to purchase enterprise software the way they shop on their smartphones.

SAP has made some changes and additions to its enterprise application store, including a new deal with Bazaarvoice aimed at improving the volume and quality of product reviews on the site.

The store now contains more than 2,000 applications from SAP and some 1,000 partners, the ERP vendor said Friday. The offerings include mobile, cloud-based and on-premises software.

Other recent improvements include the ability to buy some partner applications using PayPal, new tools partners can use to build out storefronts and expanded geographic availability of the store to 26 countries. New additions include Belgium, Denmark, Hong Kong, Norway, the Philippines, Spain and Sweden, SAP said.

SAP has also added the ability for customers and partners to buy and resell its Business One ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for smaller companies through the store.

This is an "interesting" move, but "it's still to be proved that customers will buy ERP that way," said Forrester Research analyst China Martens.

But SAP's decision to use Bazaarvoice is welcome, Martens said: "More useful, identifiable reviews are great."

Bazaarvoice's technology helps companies generate reviews, push them to partners' sites, and encourage customers to share them, according to its website. In January, however, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Bazaarvoice over its acquisition of PowerReviews, saying the deal "substantially lessened competition in the market for product ratings and reviews platforms in the United States, resulting in higher prices and diminished innovation."

Meanwhile, ERP vendors have been rushing to build out application stores, "but it's been slow to gather momentum as an additional channel," Martens added. "I wonder if it's still more of a window shopping experience."

While customers who do make purchases through application stores gain the benefit of speed, rather than undergoing the usual enterprise sales process, they also give up the chance to negotiate the cost of purchases.

Enterprise application stores may still have some evolving to do, in Martens' view. "Is there one overarching store where folks search for all the vendor has to offer, or more of a mall approach with many stores, each focused on a particular product?" she said.

SAP may discuss plans for the application store further next week during its Sapphire conference in Orlando.

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SAP's cloud moves show businesses won't tolerate 18-month deployments any ... - VentureBeat

Posted: 12 May 2013 07:13 PM PDT

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013

San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise software giant SAP has been throwing its hands in the air for years, exclaiming that it is indeed a cloud company. But yesterday, SAP took a big step that shows where the it and its customers are at by offering its "HANA" in-memory database technology from its own cloud.

HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance) is an appliance that stores terabytes worth of data and can move through that data at high speeds. As of this week, SAP and its clients are storing more than 750TBs of data in the system. HANA is an expensive solution not many companies can offer, and it's clearly important to SAP's future. "We expect [HANA] to have a billion-dollar future on its own," SAP mobility head Sanjay Poonen told us in November.

SAP previously only offered HANA via the cloud through Amazon Web Services. There are many potential reasons why SAP would want to offer HANA from its own cloud rather than AWS. For example, it gives SAP more control over its product, lets SAP allocate the right high-performance hardware for HANA's monumental tasks, and lets SAP offer HANA in the cloud at a lower overall cost.

Another reason SAP has moved HANA to its own cloud is that HANA has reportedly underperformed with current customers. SAP has even given away HANA for free to some tech startups in order to seed interest and maybe gain more big customers if those startups grow big.

But after talking with several "big data" experts, one final reason particularity sticks out: SAP needed to move HANA to its own cloud to make it easier to deploy the damn thing to businesses.

"In the last 10 years, the speed of business has significantly increased," Stefan Groschupf, the CEO of Hadoop-based big data analytics startup Datameer, told VentureBeat. "No one has time to wait 18 months anymore."

Essentially, many businesses have given up on overly long deployment cycles — it bogs down other processes, and the software is outdated once it's ready to be deployed. Cloud software pioneers like Workday have shown enterprises how handy the cloud can be and they like what they've seen.

SAP and chief competitor Oracle have been watching this trend carefully during the past few years. Both companies have acquired smaller companies and launched new cloud-focused products to help speed up deployments and stay relevant. SAP's biggest move in recent history was acquiring SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion back in December 2011. Similarly, Oracle has purchased a boatload of companies.

In the case of HANA, this is SAP tapping two huge trends (big data and cloud) and trying to tie the biggest companies in the world to its solution. Offering it via the cloud means companies might bring in those companies that see how the cloud can speed up their workflow.

That said, lean startups focused on big data solutions could gobble up some of the market SAP wants to attack with HANA. One such startup is SiSense, a big data company that has seen a 520 percent growth in subscription revenues in the past year. SiSense's offering is different than HANA but it still thinks it can solve many businesses' big data qualms.

"We can run on any hardware out there; many companies don't want to buy new hardware," SiSense marketing VP Bruno Aziza told VentureBeat. "There's been a shift in the market for how people procure their big data solutions."

For example, SiSense's CTO recently crunched 10TBs of data in 10 seconds using an off-the-shelf $10,000 server as a conference stunt.

Another thing on SiSense's side: it only takes "hours" to deploy.

Clouds image via PhotoAtelier/Flickr

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