A new market battle is brewing
in the enterprise applications space. The soon-to-be combatants: SAP
and Salesforce.com, both of which aim to convince businesses of all
sizes to use their on-demand CRM software.

In the next four to five weeks,
SAP plans to introduce a subscription-based CRM application that will
be delivered over the Internet, according to sources close to the
company. SAP originally was expected to unveil the application at its
Sapphire '05 customer conference in Boston earlier this month.

Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research for market analysis firm Nucleus Research also has an interesting comment:

"It would make sense for SAP to
have a competitive platform to Salesforce," Wettemann said. "The
question is how SAP executes, because there's a lot more to on-demand
than just workflow. There are also things like analytics and built-in
sales coaching. If you are that late to the party, you have to be
wearing a really cute dress."

Perhaps. I think Salesforce.com got quite a bit of traction without having a cute dress when it started. On demand is a sexy opening dress in of itself in my book.

Steve Shu