Do you believe in the old saying there is no smoke, when there is no fire? On a possible offering of hosted CRM solution by SAP there has been a lot of smoke, Recently NEWS.com is carrying a piece on the same.

Some excerpts from the article:

If SAP does jump into the on-demand CRM market, it will instantly change the balance of power in the industry. Salesforce has grown rapidly in recent years--it reported just more than $176 million in revenue for fiscal 2005--and it has become nearly synonymous with on-demand business applications.
But it has done so in the absence of a rival product from SAP, the overwhelming giant of the business software market with more than $1.7 billion in sales.

"SAP has put a bull's-eye on Siebel, Salesforce.com and other CRM leaders as it wants to make sure it has every deployment model that customers want to buy or rent," said AMR Research analyst Bruce Richardson.
SAP's official comment is that it continues

SAP's official comment is that it continues to evaluate market opportunities but has no plans to introduce new hosted CRM applications anytime soon.

Bill McDermott, the chief executive of SAP America, attempted to downplay the need for SAP to launch a new product.
"Hosted is really only relevant in the small-business space, and Salesforce isn't delivering the same sort of integrated products we already offer," McDermott said. "The question for Salesforce is, when these newer CRM users they have attracted need more capabilities, will they move to SAP?"

SAP has itself fueled speculation over its plans by demonstrating what it called a "slim" online sales-force automation application at a customer conference in Europe in April. The product closely resembled the online applications marketed by Salesforce.

via EmergicPrashanth RaiASP, SAAS.