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