At the SAP Sapphire conference this week, co-CEO Hasso Plattner laid out the vision for SAP's offerings to the large, mid-tier, and small company markets.
At the high-end, SAP continues to offer its core extended ERP suite known as MySAP. However, consistent with the trend throughout the industry, SAP is repositioning some functionality from the R/3 core to the CRM, SCM, and PLM modules.
For the mid-tier, SAP is offering a scaled-back version it is calling MySAP All-in-One. It is the same program code as MySAP, but limited to a single database and application instance with fewer options.
But the real news is at the low end, where SAP is introducing a completely different product that it calls SAP Business One (available in the US in late 2002). This system is based on technology that SAP acquired recently from Israeli firm TopManage, and SAP is promising to eventually make it compatible with MySAP. Assuming it can execute on this promise, this will create a strong story for small growth companies who imagine that one day they will be large enough for MySAP. With most smaller ERP vendors in financial trouble these days, the CFO of a small growth company is going to find it hard not to at least consider SAP.
Line 56 has more information on SAP's offerings.
