SAP launches Business Suite 7 8 May, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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Enabled by service-oriented architecture (SOA), Business Suite 7 is the latest bundle of SAP's main enterprise applications, including SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Supplier Relationship Management, SAP Supply Chain Management and SAP Product Lifecycle Management. The company has made improvements to each of the applications included in the bundle that are largely dependent on the department or process being served.

"It's basically the product family of our enterprise product applications," said Philip Say, vice president of solution marketing for SAP ERP.

One of the key changes from an end-user's point of view is that the transitions from one product to another are much more seamless, Say said.

"In terms of universal improvement we've made to the product, I think if you start from the user's perspective, what the customers will start to see is a significant degree of harmony between the applications in terms of the user experience," he said.

Additionally, enhancement packages have been included that will help customers reduce the cost and complexity. They will eliminate the need for large-scale upgrades, enabling customers to pick and choose key capabilities, and then select, test and install those capabilities without having to re-engineer the components supporting their businesses, Say said.

Additionally, the bundle was designed as the foundation for the 25 industries that SAP supports, so each industry is able to extract and configure the capabilities most meaningful to them, he explained.

"This is our first synchronized suite from SAP," Say said.

SAP is also releasing each of the individual components at the same time, with each component going through the same testing procedures and solution validation techniques, he said. SAP has improved the testing of hand-off points between the individual modules.

In terms of the total cost of ownership (TCO), the software bundle is much cheaper to run than previous versions because SAP is using a uniform set of technologies on the backend, Say said.

Over 330 customers participated in the validation and testing of the software, and according to Say, the response has been favorable in terms of Business Suite 7's quality, stability and functional benefits.

"It's been a very successful ramp-up," he said.

Another addition to SAP Business Suite is embedded analytics tools that help customers gain insight across demand, production, inventory, sales and supplier activites so they can take action based on the information.

The pricing structure has remained the same.

"It's largely user-based pricing. We offer packages, though, that range from industry packages for specific segments as well as a range dependent on the size of your company. The software can be packaged to support smaller or mid-sized companies through our SAP Business All-in-One offering, as well as larger enterprises based on our enterprise agreements," Say said.

Business Suite 7 represents significant opportunities for SAP's channel community, he said. It contains a more competitive set of capabilities that will be of interest to customers, as well as being richer in functional strength and having more support for the business challenges of the industries SAP supports.

"The partner community should be very excited about what we've done here," Say said.