Google Apps se integrará con el ERP bajo demanda de SAP

SAP y Google planean integrar sus respectivas aplicaciones de negocio basadas en cloud computing. En concreto, la suite de ERP bajo demanda Business ByDesign de SAP se integrará en Google Apps en el primer trimestre de 2012, primero en fase piloto disponible en Estados Unidos, Francia y Reino Unido, para extenderse a otros países después.

Según Bernd-Uwe Pagel, vicepresidente senior de outsourcing y del ecosistema bajo demanda de SAP, para poder utilizar la solución integrada de Business ByDesign y Google Apps será preciso licenciar ambos productos, aunque no ha precisado si los clientes de la suite de ERP bajo demanda de la compañía tendrán que pagar más. Lo que sí ha aclarado es que la alianza con Google no afectará a las relaciones que la compañía mantiene en la actualidad con Microsoft para la integración con Office de sus aplicaciones ERP.
Ya hay clientes trabajando con la integración de SAP y Google, aunque queda por resolver cómo incorporar Google Apps en los flujos de procesos de ByDesign de modo que, por ejemplo, una cita introducida en el módulo CRM del software de SAP aparezca también en Google Calendar.
El acuerdo contempla además la adopción por parte de SAP de Android y Google App Engine como plataformas de desarrollo para ByDesign, creando así un ecosistema más amplio para la suite de ERP.
Aunque esta alianza entre Google y SAP podría dar lugar en el futuro a nuevas soluciones integradas, no está clara su exclusividad. De hecho, Google ya mantiene relaciones de alto nivel con  Salesforce.com, competidor de SAP en cloud computing. Salesforce.com anunció recientemente la adquisición de la startup Rypple como base de su futura división de recursos humanos.

 
La operación se produjo poco después de la compra por SAP de la firma de recursos humanos SuccessFactors por 3.400 millones de dólares.
 
En cualquier caso, la integración de ByDesign y Google Apps tiene sentido por cuanto SAP cuenta con una base de clientes de 88.000 pymes, mientras que la suite de aplicaciones de negocio en cloud de Google ya está siendo utilizada por más de cuatro millones de empresas de todo el mundo.

SAP, los planes para la nube

Los principios de diseño mas importantes del enfoque de la nube de SAP según Hagemann Snabe son : "cero en tiempo de incoporación, tiempo de aprendizaje, tiempo de inactividad, tiempo de integración, tiempo de espera y los costes marginales", dijo Hagemann Snabe.

Con tristeza reconoció que en lo primero -SAP-  algo falló en el enfoque de la nube hace varios años, y que no cumplía con el "cero" en las normas.

La reciente adquisición de SAP, SuccessFactors se ajusta a los planes de la nube de SAP.
"SAP no tenía el ADN del modelo de negocio de la nube", dijo Hagemann Snabe. "SuccessFactors es la compañía de más rápido crecimiento en la nube y además con la más alta retención -. El 60% de lo clientes repiten".

Agregó que SuccessFactors aporta 15 millones de usuarios en la familia SAP.

"SuccessFactors es una oportunidad para mirar a un modelo de cómo hacer una serie de aplicaciones con éxito. Con él conseguimos ,el valor de la nube sin interrupciones a los clientes de SAP ", dijo Sikka.

Volviendo la atención al relanzamiento de Business ByDesign, Hagemann Snabe dijo que SAP cumplirá con su meta de 1.000 clientes de Business ByDesign a finales de 2011. Además, señaló que SAP permitirá a los socios ejecutar un negocio en un modelo de nube.  

Sanjay Poonen, Presidente mundial de soluciones de SAP, explicó que las ofertas de SAP en la nube están disponibles para cualquier cliente independientemente de su tamaño - Business One para pequeñas empresas, Business ByDesign para las empresas medianas y aplicaciones tales como Sales OnDemand y BI OnDemand para grandes empresas.

Comparison with a Business Consolidation System(BCS) background

NOTE:  SAP BPC 7.5 NW

• Applications hold transaction data.
• Applications are InfoCubes in BW.
• Applications have multiple dimensions and they have multiple properties.
• The dimensions are characteristics and the attributes are navigational.
• The Legal application is equivalent to the InfoCube we define in the databasis.
• The Rate application would equal the TCURR table.
• The Ownership application is equivalent to the investment / equity data store object.
• Account Dimension = Item.
• Category = Version.
• Datasource Dimension = Posting level and document type.
• Entity Dimension= consolidation unit.
• Group Dimension= consolidations groups
• Intercompany Dimension = Trading Partner.
• Additional user defined dimensions = additional sub assignments.
• Business Rules = Methods.
• Account transformations = Reclassifications.
• Automatic Adjustments = Inter Unit Eliminations and COI Entries.
• Work status = Blocked tasks.
• BPF’s relate to the Monitor.
• Input and Report Currency Dimension= currency key.
• In the Rate App: Account = Exchange Rate Type (Avg, End, etc)
• InfoProvider data manager package = Load Data Stream
• Balancing logic = Selected Items
• BPC for Excel = Business Explorer Analyzer
• BPC allows periodic or YTD data storage while BCS is always periodic.






Note: Dimensions in Business Planning and Consolidation are the same as characteristics in BW. Dimensions in BW however are tables in an InfoCube. BW Dimensions may contain one or more characteristics.

ApShell application

You use the ApShell application set to build your own application sets. It contains sample applications, system information and defaults, and report and input schedule templates. Because it is a shell, it needs to be filled in with publications and reports in order to become a fully functioning application set. The dimension master data is included and that means it is ready to run.

You must not modify ApShell.

It is highly recommended that the delivered ApShell not be modified. Instead, ApShell should be utilized as a template for all customized Application Sets. ApShell contains the correct formatted property values required for many of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation’s delivered functionality. Recreating these property based interrelationships is highly complex and is likely to fail without deep technical knowledge of the requirements.


See the public website at ’help.sap.com’ Go to SAP Business User → EPM Solutions → Business Planning and Consolidations. Also, see the BPC how to papers on the Software Developers Network (SDN.SAP.COM). This site requires an on line system support id (OSS).

Sybase, what is this?

Sybase, an SAP company, is the industry leader in delivering enterprise and mobile software to manage, analyze and mobilize information. We are recognized globally as a performance leader, proven in the most data-intensive industries and across all major systems, networks and devices. Our information management, analytics and enterprise mobility solutions have powered the world's most mission-critical systems in financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing and government. For more information, visit www.sybase.com. Read Sybase blogs: blogs.sybase.com. Follow us on Twitter at @Sybase.


More informacion : SOURCE

SAP continua empujando con HANA, cloud, mobility

SAP continúa recalcando los tres temas principales, HANA, aplicaciones móviles y la nube. Y así lo hizo  en su Cumbre de 2011 Influyente SAP ,en Boston, con un discurso de cuatro horas.

Sin embargo, el enfoque de HANA es el cambio de la educación para los casos de uso del mundo real y el impulso del mercado.

SAP HANA and in-memory computing

SAP HANA es "el producto de más rápido crecimiento que SAP ha tenido nunca", dijo Vishal Sikka, director de tecnología de SAP, y miembro de la junta directiva. Gran parte del crecimiento HANA ha sido en Asia.

"El siguiente paso es conseguir introducir HANA en todas las empresas", dijo Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO. "Creo que SAP va un año y medio antes en la competición. HANA ya no es un proyecto de investigación ".

 

SAP está trabajando con Ufida, una gran empresa china de software ERP para desarrollar casos de uso de SAP, a pesar de que las dos empresas son competidoras en el mercado de ERP. SAP también se está asociando con Tibco, una compañía de infraestructura, sobre el despliegue de HANA.

 

Mientras que las directrices anteriores en el inicio se habían centrado en las especificaciones técnicas de HANA, el equipo ejecutivo trató de empujar HANA como una aplicación en el mundo real, enfocándolo de esta manera para que los asistentes no se perdieran.

"A medida que pasa el tiempo, los casos de uso discutidos por SAP para HANA son cada vez más específicos y convincentes", dijo Vitali Rudnytskiy, Mentor SAP HANA y consultor.

 

Por ejemplo, el CIO Martin Flegenheimer  de la empresa Ferrero  mostró cómo su compañía ha buscado en SAP HANA Accelerator para SAP CO-PA para la presentación de informes de rentabilidad en tiempo real. El consumo de chocolate en realidad tiene picos cuando la economía no va tan bien, dijo Flegenheimer. El Acelerador de HANA ayuda Ferrero adaptarse a los cambios.

 

 

“Business Suite accelerators is HANA's best potential in the next year,” dijo Jon Reed, SAP Mentor y analista.

 

Varios analistas siguen teniendo curiosidad por saber cómo Sybase IQ va a encajar en los planes de SAP con HANA, pero Raj Nathan, vicepresidente ejecutivo de Sybase se cuidó en señalar que aunque existe un cierto solapamiento entre los productos, los universos de los clientes de cada uno son tan grandes que se superponen. Como analista de BI, Cindi Howson ha señalado, "Sybase IQ es un DBMS [sistema de gestión de base de datos] y SAP HANA es la infraestructura."

 

From SAP PartnerEdge . . .

I wish you and your beloved ones a wonderful holiday season filled with peace and good will.

¿Cual crees que será dentro de las soluciones Business Analytics la más implantada en 2012?

1.- Analytic Applications ( Industria, Linea de Negocio).

2.- Data Warehousing (consolidar la información, SAP BW,ACCELERATOR, HANA In-Memory, Sybase, Data Mart, Power design).

3.- BI (SAP BO Edge BI, Web Intelligent, Reporting, Dashboards, SAP Crystal Solutions, BI Platform, Mobile)

4.-EIM (Governance, MDM, Data Integration and Data Quality Management,Content Management, Information Lifecycle Management)

5.-EPM (SAP BPC, SAP SSM, SAP PCM, FC, FIM)

6.- GRC (Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance, Access Risk Management, Sustainability Performance Management, EHS)


Otras?  ¿Déjanos tu opinión?

BusinessObjects Strategy Management, organizations are able to - . . . .

SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management, organizations are able to:

• Effectively support cross-organization strategic performance initiatives and transparency;
• Link operational and departmentalized performance programs with enterprise initiatives;
• Drill down directly from strategic goals to underlying KPIs and data;
• Motivate stakeholders and encourage individual accountability;
• Proactively manage risks associated with the strategic vision and strategic goals;
• Align strategic programs with financial processes; and
• Enable results-oriented collaboration with embedded strategic initiative management.

Have you implated this solution? CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Maximize Profitability and Control Costs with a Business User Solution

SAP BusinessObjects Profitability & Cost Management (PCM) to help organizations minimize costs that contribute the least to profitability and focus more on the activity drivers that maximize success. SAP BusinessObjects Profitability & Cost Management will enable your organization to:

• Quickly identify and understand operational issues that impact the bottom line;
• Test allocation changes to assess their impact on profitability before rolling them out;
• Complete customer value analyses to determine how customer-related activities and investments impact profit;
• Evaluate shared services costing, such as IT services, to gain insight on how these costs can be minimized;
• Make informed decisions and take the guess-work out of resource allocation; and
• Gain rapid ROI from solution investment with an application that is utilized and owned by business users, not IT.

Tell me more . . . 

SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management integrates with ..

The SAP BusinessObjects FIM application can help your finance team become more productive by supporting the ability to easily connect with disparate data sources, so you can access, map, and load all relevant information for greater transparency and efficiency. The software also supports your efforts to integrate enterprise performance management (EPM) processes for closed-loop performance management and is designed to be extremely end-user friendly. SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management integrates with the following:

• SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management
• SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation
• SAP BusinessObjects Intercompany
• SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for the Microsoft platform
• SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation, version for SAP NetWeaver
• SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management 

¿What do U thing?

IFRS Update – Standards published in 2011

At the end of 2010, the IASB and the FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) decided to amend their common work plan in order to refocus on priority projects. The main objective was to complete the most important convergence projects by 30 June 2011, in time for the SEC’s (Securities Exchange Commission) planned 2011 vote on the adoption of IFRS.

More . . . sdn


by Patricia Meteil-Dutartre is member of SAP EPM

BPC 10.0 hasta el próximo año. .seguimos esperando

Esta son las fechas a las que tendremos que esperar

BPC 10.0 NW GA fecha
Targeted Completion date Ramp-Up: 20 Febrero 2012

BPC 10.0 MS GA fecha
Targeted Completion date Ramp-Up: 31 Enero 2012

Aqui un poco de ayuda
http://help.sap.com/bopacnw100/

Need to wait BPC 10.0 till Next year

BPC 10.0 NW GA date
Targeted Completion date Ramp-Up: 20 February 2012

BPC 10.0 MS GA date
Targeted Completion date Ramp-Up: 31 January 2012

Nice help site
http://help.sap.com/bopacnw100/

Looking for BPC demos, ... and so on

Looking for BPC demos, customer references, roadmaps, performance and sizing information, training, documentation or tips & tricks?

Courtesy: Jens Koerner of SAP CSA

SOURCE: SDN

Nuestra instalación está diversificada, difícil de conseguir consistencia en el sistema de reporting financiero

Muchas empresas que tienen oficinas o unidades de reporting diversificadas, con oficinas en distintas partes del planeta, se enfrentan al reto de conseguir la consistencia de sus Sistemas de Reporting Fnanciero y otra tipo de información cualitativa.  

A veces, incluso la captura de estos Informes Financieros es un gran desafío. Si bien lograr una mayor coherencia en la información cuantitativa por la asignación directa a través del Plan de Cuentas u otros enfoques más tradicionales, o cuando se trata de la presentación de informes contables, notas adicionales que soportan los estados financieros, se enfrentan a problemas para obtener esta información, o también ocurre que pasa mucho tiempo para que esta información sea uniforme. 

Informes sobre su negocio puede ser completamente mal interpretados por los accionistas, analistas financieros y de esta forma pueden traer una percepción diferente de la empresa.

SAP Business Objects Notes Management 10.0, ayuda en la recolección de los datos no estructurados que se observa en el contexto de los datos financieros y permite la construcción de la coherencia, la agregación y despliegue de los datos de notas a diferentes empresas del grupo. La solución construida sobre SAP Netweaver se integra perfectamente a los datos SAP. Lo que realmente ayuda en el despliegue de una manera fácil de recopilar los datos no estructurados y el informe de la misma.

¿Tienes implantada esta solución?

Influye tener un buen equipo de consultores SAP a la hora de realizar proyectos

....o los proyecos se ganan porque el CEO, CIO o CFO conoce al Socio de turno.

¿Son capaces las organizacines de jugársela con sus proyectos por un contacto?

Cuenta tu caso en el que veias que el proyecto era tuyo y de repente te enteras que el Director del Departamento Financiero o Control de Gestión era amigo de otra consultora.

I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?

BPC Script logic - Scope using member property

*XDIM_MEMBERSET is for scoping based on the member ID.

What if user wants to scope members based on a specific property value?

       For example, a user wants to filter Account dimension members those are Asset. To achieve this, we need to use ACCTYPE property which has the type value of account. AST is the value for ASSET account.
(Note: Value is based on the APSHELL of BPC.)


The command is *XDIM_FILTER. The usage is

*XDIM_FILTER <DIMENSIONNAME> = [DIMENSIONName].Properties("Property name") = "Property value"

      So above example can be written as below.
      *XDIM_FILTER ACCOUNT = [account].properties(“ACCTYPE”)=”AST”

      Let's say Account dimension has 3 members as below.
         ID           ACCTYPE
      Extsales          INC
      CASH              AST
      TAXES             EXP
      NETINCOME    INC

  
      Then about *XDIM_FILTER_ACCOUNT will select CASH member only.
      Let's assume If you already used multiple *XDIM_MEMBERSET command
      and below are selected data from the fact tables.
 
    *XDIM_MEMBERSET TIME = 2011.JAN
      *XDIM_MEMBERSET CATEGORY = BUDGET
     <Result>
     EXTSALES , 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 9000
     CASH     , 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 3000
     TAXES    , 2011.JAN, BUDGET,  800
     NETINCOME, 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 1500

     Now if you add *XDIM_FILTER against ACCOUNT dimension.
     *XDIM_MEMBERSET TIME = 2011.JAN
     *XDIM_MEMBERSET CATEGORY = BUDGET
     *XDIM_FILTER ACCOUNT = [account].properties(“ACCTYPE”)=”AST”

 
     Only one record will be selected from above result because CASH is
     the only account member that has 'AST' value of ACCTYPE property.
     <Result>
     CASH     , 2011.JAN, BUDGET, 3000

Necesito Elaborar Presupuestos y realizar la Consolidación de unos 10.000 usuarios en mas de 100 oficinas

Muchas de las grandes compañias gestionan y realizan sus ciclos presupuestarios o sus procesos de consolidación con varios cientos o miles de usuarios esparcidos por tod el mundo o distintas oficinas.


Especialmente estos ciclos utilizan la planificación de abajo hacia arriba ( conocida como bottom up), en el que se busca o quiere que todos los Gerentes introduzcan y presenten sus planes. Estos roles necesitan una interfaz sencilla (user friendly), amigable, basada en entornos Web, con la que los usuarios de negocio están familiarizados, y además si es posible que IT no les esté instalado cada dos por tres nuevos accesos ( nota: estoy harto de depender de IT, quiero hacerlo yo).

  
También es importante que estas interfaces pueden ser ejecutadas con una formación mínima, de esta manera nuestro front de usuario debe de ser intuitivo y permitir a los usuarios aprender por su cuenta de forma rápida. Yo me lo guiso , yo me lo como.
 

SAP BO EPM 10.0, con su nueva interfaz Web 2.0, nos trae un aspecto completamente nuevo, muy intuitivo y de agradable experiencia para el gen Y, el cual está más expuesto a google/facebook como interfaz de usuario. Otra característica mejorada es que también el despliegue del interfaz puede ser gestionado de forma centralizada, sin tener que instalar nada en los equipos cliente de los usuarios.

Facil, sencillo, . . .¿que mas se puede pedir? mAs información jobepm@gmail.com

SAP factura un 16% más hasta septiembre

La compañía alemana de software de gestión empresarial SAP alcanzó una cifra de negocio de 9.733 millones de euros en los nueve primeros meses del año, lo que representa una mejora del 16 por ciento respecto al mismo periodo de 2010, informó la empresa.


  En concreto, las ventas de software aumentaron un 27 por ciento, mientras que las de servicios crecieron un 17 por ciento. Asimismo, el beneficio operativo de la compañía germana aumentó un 57 por ciento, hasta 3.208 millones de euros.

LINK

Lo que nos viene encima a los consultores SAP para el 2012

Estamos en Diciembre del 2011 y ya se acaba el año. Voy a tratar de presentar mis puntos de vista sobre lo que serán las áreas mas calientes para los consultores SAP para el próximo año. Están son slo mis opiniones así que mucho valor no tienen pero las quiero compartir con vosotros y que me deis vuestra opinión.


 1. SAP BPC - Planificación y Consolidación
Con mucha diferencia, la mayor atracción que preveo es SAP BPC, con una gran cantidad de clientes que moverán sus aplicaciones de planificación y presupuestación a SAP BPC, y algunos incluso harán sus consolidados en SAP BPC. Sería una buena idea formarse y aprender la versión 10.0, entonces tendría cierta ventaja. SAP BPC también está programado para trabajar con HANA en un futuro próximo, lo que conlleva una mejora de algunos problemas de rendimiento que se han visto en proyectos.


 2. BI 4.0
Justo al lado de SAP BPC está BI 4.0 en términos de atracción de mercado. SAP lo anunció con una sobredosis de bombo y plantillo, y luego tuvo que trabajar durante meses para estabilizarlo. Todavía hay cosas que limar - pero está en una etapa donde se pueden ver a muchos clientes que quieren hacer grandes proyectos.

3. EHS Management
Esta no es un área en la que he tenido mucho interés, y ahora mi opinión está cambiando y veo un gran repunte. Medio ambiente, la gestión de la salud y de la seguridad necesitan no sentirse aisladas, y necesitan un enfoque integral que incluye otros módulos como el MM, y naturalmente BI.

 

 

4. La logística inversa
Como ya sabemos la logística es una de las soluciones más implementadas de SAP - e.d. cuando una empresa vende a un cliente.  

La logística inversa es lo contrario, cuando un cliente devuelve algo que compró, y hay que reemplazarlo, o repararlo, o servirlo, etc. Al parecer, este proceso no siempre ha sido atendido en numerosas implementaciones y ahora parece que hay un interés renovado. Junto con RMA, son áreas como Service Parts planning  y gestión.

5. ABAP
ABAP, que ya es conocido por todos de sobra, sin duda vuelva a estar caliente de nuevo. La diferencia está en el tipo de trabajo que se realiza en ABAP. El lista de procesos, tipos de BAdI de trabajo sigue siendo de los productos básicos, y no espero que eso cambie. El gran motor creo que esta en la implementación de ECC y el mercado de re-implementación, donde algunos grandes clientes están optando por hacer algunas implementaciones nuevas.

 

 

6. SAP HR - sobre todo nómina
Muchas compañias de utilizaban SAP habían elegido históricamente a PeopleSoft HR. Y ahora veo que muchos quieren ver de nuevo a SAP HR. La parte de Nómina parece estar bastante caliente. Es una habilidad muy especializada y necesita algo de experiencia según en que pais se implante, ya que hay variaciones en la mayoría de los países, y tiene un umbral más alto para la entrada de nuevos consultores.

7. BW 7.3
Espero ver una gran cantidad de mejoras para el 2012 y tiene ahora una mejor funcionalidad. Además, es el nivel mínimo tiene que ser para HANA,  para poder trabajar con BW. No es difícil aprender.

  

 

8.SOLMAN

No soy un gran experto en Solution Manager, mejor dicho no tengo ni idea, pero tiene una buena base de mercado, y en el 2012 deberíamos ver una mayor demanda. Espero ver muchos proyectos de actualización, y muchos otros de implementacion en nuevos clientes. Aunque personalmente no soy un gran fan de Solution Manager - debo de decir que estoy viendo un gran interés en estos días por SolMan.

¿Se me olvida alguno? ¿Cual es tu opinión?

A todos nos gusta el Excel, pero existen muchos - hay que unificarlos

Cuando se trata de realizar la Planificación, Elaboración de Presupuestos, Previsión, Reporting Financiero o el Análisis de Coste / Rentabilidad, no hay mejor herramienta para los usuarios de negocio que Microsoft Excel. 

Así que los usuarios dentro de sus favoritos tienen al Excel como uno de sus primeros iconos!!No lo dudes!!. 

Vayamos a su negocio del día a día .El desafío ( o amenaza )  y la tarea que más tiempo les tiene ocupados es extraer los datos manualmente al Excel desde los diferentes motores de modelos distintos. Que si datos desde el motor de planificación o desde la aplicación de consolidación o el sistema de costes. Entonces llega la gran pregunta aquí y es la siguiente:

Quiero utilizar Excel como si fuese mi mejor amigo, pero me gustaría unificar todos los datos en la misma hoja de cálculo - es decir, obtener una versión única, mi foto? ¿Es posible? .

Con SAP Business Objects  EPM 10.0, tenemos un perfecto addin EPM de Microsoft Office, que permite que toda esta información de las distintas aplicaciones como Planificación y Consolidación (SAP BPC), Consolidación Financiera (SAP BPC - SAP FC), Rentabilidad y Gestión de Costes ( SAP PCM), Gestión de la Estrategia(SAP SM) se muestren en una sola hoja de cálculo, lo que conllevaría un sistema unificado de información con un gran valor dentro del Performance management de nuestro negocio, pero manteniendo el poder de las aplicaciones individuales que están especialmente diseñadas para cada uno de los procesos de negocio y cálculos complejos.

SAP to Acquire SuccessFactors for $3.4 Billion

The SAP statement is below.

WALLDORF, Germany and SAN MATEO, Calif. , Dec. 3, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — SAP AG and SuccessFactors, Inc. today announced that SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has entered into a definitive merger agreement with SuccessFactors, the market-leading provider of cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solutions, pursuant to which a subsidiary of SAP would offer to acquire all outstanding shares of common stock of SuccessFactors for $40.00 /per share in cash, representing an enterprise value of approximately $3.4 billion . The acquisition will add SuccessFactors’ widely respected team and technology to SAP’s powerful cloud assets, significantly accelerating SAP’s momentum as a provider of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure. The combination of SAP and SuccessFactors will establish an advanced end-to-end offering of cloud and on-premise solutions for managing all relevant business processes.

  

The SuccessFactors board of directors has unanimously approved the transaction. The per share purchase price represents a 52% premium both over the December 2nd closing price and the one month volume weighted average price per share. The transaction will be funded from SAP’s cash on hand and a euro 1 billion term loan facility. The closing of the tender offer is conditioned on SuccessFactors stockholders tendering at least a majority of the outstanding shares of SuccessFactors common stock (on a fully diluted basis) and clearances by relevant regulatory authorities. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012 and be slightly dilutive to SAP’s Non-IFRS earnings per share in 2012 and accretive in subsequent years.

  

The acquisition marks another stride in SAP’s strategy of delivering solutions on premise, in the cloud and on mobile devices. It builds on a series of strategic moves in SAP’s targeted growth areas to drive innovation in its core applications and analytics; introduce breakthrough in memory technology; establish leadership in enterprise mobility; and grow its cloud portfolio. SuccessFactors’ solutions are highly complementary to SAP’s core HCM offerings as well as SAP’s strong cloud assets: SAP Business ByDesign for the suite cloud market and SAP’s line of business cloud offerings for large enterprises such as SAP Sales on Demand.

  

“The cloud is a core of SAP’s future growth, and the combination of SuccessFactors’ leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse. The acquisition will help us address the top priority for CEOs globally – managing people and talent,” said Bill McDermott , Co-CEO, SAP. “Together, SAP and SuccessFactors will create tremendous business value for customers, with potent synergies to accelerate our growth in the cloud.”
“The depth and experience that SAP brings to customers via our cloud and on-premise portfolio fit elegantly with SuccessFactors’ world-class expertise in providing high-performing, low-cost, native cloud applications that customers are passionate about,” said Jim Hagemann Snabe, Co-CEO, SAP. “Together, we will lead the industry in providing end-to-end solutions consistently to meet any deployment preference, whether on premise, in the cloud or on device.”

  

“This is a revolutionary combination of proven capabilities that will allow SuccessFactors to accelerate our roadmap by 10 years, and bring the world’s leading application knowledge and intellectual property to our customers through the cloud, and the largest applications customer base instantly,” said Lars Dalgaard , Founder and CEO, SuccessFactors. “Expanding relationships with SAP’s 176,000 customers with our speed to value, friendly user interface, on mobile devices and the web, and seamlessly delivering more SAP solutions in the cloud will be legendary, as organizations adopt the cloud to improve their business. SuccessFactors has proven we have the technology and people to deliver the world’s biggest cloud deployments in terms of users and countries per customer, and also the most applications per customer from the same flexible scalable cloud platform. The business world is ready for enterprise-class cloud applications and together, we can deliver incredible new innovation for global businesses.”

  

SuccessFactors is believed to operate the largest scale of paying cloud users with 15 million subscription seats. With more than 3,500 customers in 168 countries, SuccessFactors is growing rapidly, recording 77 percent revenue growth year-over-year in the third quarter 2011 and 59 percent revenue growth year-over-year in the first nine months of 2011. SuccessFactors’ scalable cloud application platform supports organizations of all sizes from dozens to millions of users. With proven deployments in SAP environments at companies in diverse industries, the combination of SuccessFactors and SAP holds significant growth potential considering the more than 500 million employees of SAP customers and its 15,000 HCM deployments.

 

With headquarters in San Mateo, California , and more than 1,450 employees, the SuccessFactors team is widely regarded for creating innovative technology, generating more than 80 percent of new sales from applications that did not exist five years ago, and as one of the fastest growing leaders in cloud applications. Upon completion of the transaction, the CEO of SuccessFactors, Lars Dalgaard , will lead the cloud business of SAP in addition to his responsibility as CEO of SuccessFactors. SuccessFactors will remain independent and be named “SuccessFactors, an SAP company”. The chairman of SAP’s supervisory board, Hasso Plattner , recommended that Lars Dalgaard be appointed to the executive board of SAP AG.

 

SAP and SuccessFactors Customers to Benefit from Combined Application and Technology Footprint

The combination of SuccessFactors and SAP will create a comprehensive HCM solution, marrying strength in enterprise applications with people-focused cloud applications.
SuccessFactors’ complementary solutions will be an attractive option for more than 500 million employees of SAP customers.

 

SuccessFactors’ applications are designed for businesses of all sizes, and offer easily adopted solutions for customers of SAP Business Suite, SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Business  All-in-One, and SAP Business One.

SuccessFactors’ cloud expertise and know how, rapid cloud innovation and proven success running large scale cloud deployments will help SAP customers more rapidly adopt cloud applications.

 

SuccessFactors’ mobile applications combined with the mobile expertise of SAP and Sybase will offer customers a powerful business-to-employee mobility portfolio.

 

SuccessFactors’ focus on enabling business insight and execution fits well with SAP’s business analytics platform, promising new levels of real time decision making across the enterprise.

SuccessFactors’ software is a cloud-based suite of tools around managing various personnel issues in a business: Performance management, goal setting, managing compensation and even planning for succession among senior managers. Its also has a pretty rich set of customers for so small a company: Among them are chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, cable giant Comcast and hedge fund BlackRock. The company has about 15 million active subscription seats, and boasts in its earnings reports about one customer in Europe that has 400,000 users and another in the U.S. with 2 million.
 
The company reported $205 million in revenue in 2010 and a GAAP loss of $12.5 million, but a 7-cent per-share profit on a non-GAAP basis. It was on track to do $330 million or more in sales in 2011.
What’s it mean for SAP? Basically SuccessFactors gets integrated directly into the SAP Business ByDesign portfolio that McDermott talked about. SAP says in its statement that the deal will be paid for with cash on hand, and by a 1 billion euro loan facility.

Seven Questions for SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott

With the European debt crisis still not resolved, you’d think a European company like SAP would be playing it safe. However, there’s not a cautious note in anything Bill McDermott, SAP’s co-CEO, says.
Having last week reported that quarterly earnings surged — in part because it’s likely to pay smaller legal damages to Oracle than had been expected following the TomorrowNow lawsuit — SAP showed strength across all its geographic regions as sales of its software licenses increased 28 percent.
The next day, McDermott stopped by my office in New York, where we talked about SAP’s plans for the cloud and mobile applications. But first I asked about SAP’s role as one of two targets that cloud application companies like Salesforce.com and Workday are gunning for.



AllThingsD: Business at SAP seems pretty good, as your recent quarterly results bear out, but you have all these different companies gunning for you. Whether its Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com or Aneel Bhusri at Workday, and several others, they all say they want customers from Oracle and SAP. You’ve got a lot of these high-protein customers that everyone wants to take away from you. What does that mean for you?

McDermott: If you look at the market we serve, we have 176,000 customers, and the best names in the world run SAP. It’s no mystery that a Salesforce or a Workday or any number would want to take some of that away from us. They want a bite at that apple. The difficult thing to replicate is what it took 40 years to build. The big themes we have in our favor is one, we have this consistent core platform. If you think about it, you’re a CEO, you have a company, you build things, you have financials, you have supply chain, you have customers, you have suppliers, and on an end-to-end basis you have to make the business network logistically sound and operationally excellent because there’s a lot of endpoints, and margin points in doing that well. And by the way, if you don’t do it well, odds are your competitor will and you’ll lose the game. This is a foundational layer. That took 40 years to build into a masterpiece.
  
And so what are some of the newer themes?
One recent trend that’s important is this idea of the real-time enterprise. Most of these companies are dealing with heterogenous environments for one reason or another. They had legacy systems, they bought other companies, they’ve done things with maverick buyers, so they have a lot of stuff. They’re looking to aggregate all their data into one comprehensive master data strategy. That’s where the magic of the platform happens because if I can get the data aggregated in the right way I can ask the platform any question I want. So we layered on business analytics technology and this thing called HANA, the high performance application appliance, puts all that information in main memory, so you don’t have to go to the disk to get your data. It’s right there in main memory. For example, let’s say I’m an auto manufacturer and oil prices spike. Smaller cars are going to sell better than big ones and so my mix is going to shift accordingly. What’s that mean to my earnings per share? In the old days that would mean lots of analysis and lots of spreadsheets and after three months you get sort of an answer. Now you can just ask the system the question and it will give you the answer based on data.
 
When I think of SAP I think of an older-world type of software that has to run on-premise, and as we both know that’s a model that’s constantly under attack from people who say the cloud is where it’s at. But SAP has its own cloud strategy and product, doesn’t it?
We also have our own cloud strategy. And we have a serious plan to promote SAP Cloud. And in that cloud we’re going to unleash Business ByDesign. We’ve been on a slow roll to 1,000 installs this year. That is the commitment we’ve made. The beauty of Business ByDesign for small- and mid-sized companies is that it does all the things an on-premise suite can do except it does them in the cloud. So we’re going to let the tiger out of the cage. The second thing we have is Sales OnDemand. It’s very like Facebook in its orientation. It’s a people-friendly app. The sales professionals love it. It doesn’t take a management hierarchical point of view. This is taking a more people-to-people, community-to-community approach, where you’re in pursuit of a sales opportunity and everyone in the flow who needs to participate. We think that is going to make a big difference. So far the feedback is that the customers love it.

 
Is this essentially a case where you have a cloud offering and it’s really just not promoted all that well?
Yes. I think there’s a lot of it that we don’t market and there’s a lot that we’re assembling for scale right now. And that’s because we see a market opportunity. When we look at the participants in the market, we’re not overwhelmed, and let’s leave it at that. We want to turn on our best SAP playbook and get busy being the standard in the cloud. We think we can do it in business applications.
 
Then lets talk about applications. Where do you see your strengths and weaknesses relative to the competition?
That’s an important part of this quarter. We chose an innovate-the-future versus a consolidate-the-past strategy. Others chose to buy companies, consolidate them, rationalize the headcount, leverage the margin and improve shareholder value. It’s a viable strategy. But what we chose to do was to innovate and let that be our guidepost. And we think if we can innovate and make the customer the first, middle and last part of our story and encourage a large part of our ecosystem to do the same, the customer can see the difference between consolidation and innovation. I think customers are seeing a new SAP in terms of attitude and speed of execution.
  
SAP is also widely exposed to Europe and yet you seem to be hanging in there nicely. The conventional wisdom says you’d be worried sick about the economic troubles on the continent. What are you seeing in Europe, good and bad?
I’m hanging in there because — take a company like Carlsberg, the beer company. And they have an interest in point of sale right now. So they’re using SAP to connect on their mobile device at the point of sale to their supply chain so that the shelves are always filled with Carlsberg beer wherever it’s selling so that the customer always has that choice. These companies are living in uncertain times but they’re investing because they know that if they do and others don’t they get a leapfrog advantage. If they don’t do it now, and others do, they lose the game. The companies that invest in downturns and uncertain times always come out the leaders in their industry when things improve. CEOs know this is not a choice anymore. Technology is not just an enabler of business anymore. It often is the business.
 
So what are your big bets for the time we’re in?
Bet number one, we’re going to remain the world’s leading business software company. We have a 2.5x lead on the number two and we intend to extend that. We are absolutely going to a be cloud player. The SAP Cloud is a real strategy and we’re going to turn the corner on that by letting the world know that we’re here and we’re here to win. We have a very interesting company in terms of database technologies. HANA is part of that, but we also have SyBase. We think we can be a strong player not only on the database side, but also on the main memory side with HANA as the flagship. We believe we’re the mobile business software standard and we’re now the number one and industry standard and we’re committed to remaining the business analytics leader. We have a 1.5 to 2x lead. Those are the five things we’re going to do to absolutely change the world. Whether the European debt crisis is serious or not, we’re not backing down on the strategy. Like I say to all the CEOs who care to listen, don’t let all this make you back off your strategy because if you decide to slow down or sit on your hands and wait for things to improve, you might just get wiped out by your competitors.


SOURCE:http://allthingsd.com

SAP BusinesssObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation- Streamline Planning and Reduce Business Risk

To manage performance efficiently, midsize companies need a unified planning, budgeting, and consolidation solution. The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge Planning and Consolidation application streamlines the planning process and produces management reports that instill confidence and reduce business risk.

CFOs and other senior managers are under tremendous pressure to maximize profitability, reduce operational costs, minimize risk, and improve stakeholder confidence. That pressure is even higher in a slow economy when revenue forecasts are at risk and profitability is in danger.

To be effective, business leaders need reliable, up-to-date financial and operational data both for planning purposes and for budgeting, forecasting, analysis, and statutory and management reporting. They need to be able to integrate corporate and departmental planning, model cost scenarios, and perform sensitivity analysis in order to determine operational budgets based on strategic plans and assumptions. They also need a way to help ensure a fully documented audit trail and compliance with regulatory mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for consolidating and reporting company information. The key to their success is an effective planning and consolidation environment.

Midsize companies face the additional pressure of having to operate with limited IT resources. Hence, they often resort to unmanaged spreadsheets for planning and consolidation, rendering the process chaotic, frustrating, and ineffective. The spreadsheets give them familiar modeling functionalities but lack structured processes and centralized data – resulting in significant time and manual effort throughout the planning process. Budgeting can quickly deteriorate into a “spreadsheet nightmare” in which operations managers submit unrealistic budgets, executives change figures without the operations managers’ knowledge, and version control problems multiply. There is a risk of errors resulting from a lack of checks and balances when entering or updating data. Statutory consolidations can be equally problematic when data is distributed across different departments, systems, and even countries.

The problem is made worse when critical operational and financial information is scattered across multiple applications and databases, or trapped as unstructured data residing in employee spreadsheets or e-mail attachments. Changing to a packaged software solution is usually too complex and expensive to meet the needs of midsize organizations. That’s why most of these organizations continue to settle for unmanaged spreadsheets – and to operate at a significant competitive disadvantage.

The SAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge Planning and Consolidation application addresses these issues by providing an integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting, and consolidation solution designed specifically for midsize organizations. The solution bridges the gap between the creation of financial and business plans and the daily operation of those plans – and does so at a cost midsize organizations can afford. By offering an integrated set of planning and budgeting tools and providing an intuitive, userfriendly solution, it helps align plans across the entire organization – driving great results no matter the size of the organization. That’s why many midsize companies are turning to SAP BusinessObjects Edge Planning and Consolidation.

Future HANA Enablement SAP BPC 10.0 NW

Beginning later in 2011, BPC will be enabled to run on HANA, first with replication of data using the Sybase Replication Server.  Then, in mid-2012, look for BPC to run fully on the HANA technology.

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