By Siobhan Kennedy
SAP AG rolled its first set of customer relationship management applications out the door yesterday, successfully sticking to a deadline it made at its user conference earlier this year. The German software giant used the first day of the eBusiness Conference and Expo in New York Tuesday to announce the beta availability of its first six CRM modules: field sales, field service, internet sales, customer self service, service interaction center and business partner collaboration.
Although the actual applications won’t be generally available until May, George D’Auteuil, VP of CRM for SAP America, said the beta release was effectively on a controlled availability basis whereby SAP will help a select number of customers – he wouldn’t say how many – to go live with the software.
The delivery of the six modules marks SAP’s first real entrance in the highly-competitive CRM space, already dominated by the likes of Siebel Systems Inc, Vantive Corp (now owned by PeopleSoft) and Clarify Inc (owned by Nortel). Although some components of the new offerings have been available before (the pricing configuration engine for example), this is the first time the vendor has packaged them together into applications under the CRM umbrella. According to D’Auteuil, some 400 of SAP’s customers are using the existing components, although he admitted the number going live with the new modules wouldn’t amount to that many.
D’Auteuil said all six modules would be available across SAP’s 19 solution maps, where each map refers to a different vertical industry. Although the field sales and service modules were actually announced in March, their general availability – which was due in June this year – was delayed because the products had only been customized for three markets. Now they too will be available in all 19 industry sectors, D’Auteuil said. He added that five further CRM modules will be released by the second quarter of 2000, and the remaining five by the fourth quarter 2000. But he denied SAP stood to lose ground to it competitors, in particular Oracle Corp, by not speeding the release of its remaining CRM modules. Hasso [Plattner, SAP CEO] gets into a marketplace to win, he said, I think we’re starting to demonstrate that we have the ability to execute. We feel we can really take a leadership role in this space.
