SAP was a business application company, but now it is a Platform company...so how does it effect the CIO's/Users etc. A report titled "Business Software Platform Vendor Profile: SAP" by Merv Adrian of Forrester covers this topic comprehensively.

The report starts by highlighting why this discussion is relevant, most companies use SAP for business applications and other software or platforms for a host of other purposes. Integrating and managing these multiple platform, multi technology environments are formidable challenges with significant costs. Hence 42% of the Global 2000 IT organizations that were surveyed by Forrester identify reducing the number of vendors for application software to be a priority or a critical priority, it lags only issues like cost reduction, security, integration, and standardization.

Forrester classifies Business software portfolio into three major categories or stacks: business applications, information management, and architecture & development. The report highlights how SAP fare's in each of these areas. Below is summary of the same.

Business application stack is SAP's arena of strength it dominates this space, but it has few information management or architecture and development products that are suitable for firms not already using those applications for other purposes. All of the SAP application products that we reviewed are either Leaders or Strong Performers in their categories and do well by comparison to competitors' products. Not surprisingly, most are also very significant in market presence.But their traction has been primarily with customer or environments which are already SAP shops for business applications.Even for SAP's enterprise application customers, the company's newest information management and architecture and development products come at a substantial prerequisite cost: To use these products, customers must upgrade to mySAP ERP, Any such migration is expensive and difficult to accelerate. Of course the competition doesn't mandate such dependencies.

Area of information management isn't a target area for SAP according to this report, but i was wondering with their push of the MDM solution and that as the first step towards the future i doubt that this is not going to be a focus are for long. It does have an offering in the business intelligence (BI) reporting and analytics. It has a credible product in this area, although it lags the others as per the report.SAP BI emphasizes integration with its enterprise applications over deeper reporting functionality.

Finally in the Architecture And Development stack, SAP's platform is not marketed significantly to customers that are not using or considering SAP applications; offerings like enterprise service bus and a business rules engine are not packaged for separate implementation.As with information management, SAP is absent in the full portfolio of offerings aimed at nonclients of business applications.

Conclusions:

In business applications, buying SAP is a viable single vendor strategy
Information management is not an SAP target market
For architecture and development, SAP applications clients only need apply.

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Prashanth Rai