SAP's planned suite of hosted midmarket applications will be available in select markets later this year. The company will offer more details on pricing and functionality after the Cebit trade show in March, according to CEO Henning Kagermann.

New hosted product, known internally as A1S ( will target midmarket customers who seek an inexpensive, easy-to-deploy, low-risk suite of business applications including ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management). The on-demand product will be available as a monthly subscription, giving smaller, cost-sensitive companies the flexibility to test the service and drop it if they don't like it.

Kagermann referred to A1S as an "entirely new product" that will not be a hosted version of the company's All-in-One product. All-in-One is a slimmed down version of mySAP Business Suite, which is designed for large enterprises.The hosted offering will be a highly preconfigured, "off-the-shelf" product that gives companies a range of applications with limited flexibility to tweak their functionality, he said."To drive the price down, the product must be highly standardized," Kagermann said. The need to offer a set of standardized functions, he said, also means "less choice" of options to customize the product, he added.

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Prashanth Rai