Formation of SAP Portals Subsidiary Will Complete SAP Transformation Into E-Business Leader; New Company to Be Headed by TopTier CEO Shai Agassi
Walldorf, Alemanha — SAP AG (NYSE ADR: SAP) today announced its intention to create SAP Portals, Inc., a new company dedicated to developing and marketing comprehensive, open-enterprise portal and business intelligence products. These solutions will create value and a competitive advantage for organizations and their employees, partners and customers by empowering people to collaborate effectively anywhere, at any time.
SAP Portals will initially employ 700 people in the development and marketing of people-centric solutions, including the corresponding professional services to ensure smooth and rapid implementations of innovative projects tailored to each customer’s needs. To that end, SAP Portals combines the assets of three units of the SAP group: TopTier Software (to be acquired by SAP AG; see related announcement of March 30); the current SAP AG general business unit dedicated to the mySAP Workplace enterprise portal and mySAP Business Intelligence solutions; and eSAP GmbH, an SAP professional services subsidiary focusing on enterprise portal and e-business projects.
SAP Portals will be a global company with headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., and development centers in Walldorf, Germany, and Raanana, Israel. In addition to providing products to the parent company, SAP Portals will license its technology outside the SAP Group of companies and expects a significant portion of its revenues to accrue from outside the SAP installed base.
The innovative powers rallied within SAP Portals will enable companies and individuals to move beyond the complexities and incompatibility of disparate software applications. For example, the TopTier technology fits hand-in-glove with the mySAP Workplace enterprise portal currently offered by SAP. Although SAP has worked closely with its technology partner TopTier in the past two years, the integration of TopTier’s development, marketing and sales teams experience will significantly speed up the generation of leading-edge, open-enterprise portal solutions.
User Benefits of SAP Portals
The SAP Portals solutions will enable people to share information with others and to collaborate in real time. It will be the simplest, most powerful way for people to directly take charge of information and processes. Already today, the Drag and Relate technology developed by TopTier is integrated into the mySAP Workplace and simplifies user interaction. To quickly and easily provide answers to today’s business questions, people need simply to click on an item such as a “customer” and relate it to “sales orders” to instantly explore all orders of this customer – regardless of where this information is located.
The enterprise portal and information solutions will provide all users with one entry point to the wide variety of structured and unstructured information, Web content management, collaboration tools, CRM, SCM and ERP systems, as well as legacy systems already in use in the business. SAP Portals solutions will be available to customers directly as part of the mySAP.com® e-business platform from SAP.
“The creation of SAP Portals will put us in the pole position to further extend our leadership in the enterprise portal market,” said Hasso Plattner, co-chairman of the executive board, CEO and co-founder of SAP AG. “It will largely complete our strategic move to recreate SAP as the leading provider of e-business solutions.”
Integrated Within mySAP.com e-Business Solutions
With the formation of SAP Portals, SAP will round off an organizational transformation based on the four main pillars of its mySAP.com e-business platform. In previous moves, SAP has created powerful business units to drive its CRM and SCM solutions as well SAPMarkets, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary dedicated to marketplace solutions. These and other solutions within the mySAP.com offering are available separately or as integrated parts of the mySAP.com e-business platform.
SAP Portals: One Stop Shop for People-Centric Solutions
The products will be based on an open, innovative platform and will deliver integrated solutions encompassing all relevant internal and external information, applications and services. SAP Portals will deliver to employees, customers and business partners everything they need to accomplish their individual and collaborative tasks in any role, at any time, anywhere. In this way, the SAP Portals solutions will support the full work cycle for people from acquiring knowledge, analyzing and deciding, to implementing and acting according to decisions.
In particular, SAP Portals will provide a comprehensive solution, including personalized, role-based information, applications and services. The solution will integrate SAP and non-SAP components based on an open enterprise portal platform, including Drag & Relate and unification technologies. The enterprise portal solution will also cover Web content management, retrieval and classification and provides support for the mobile worker any time, anywhere. Furthermore, SAP Portals will focus on business intelligence solutions, including analytical applications, reporting and data warehousing for managing all kinds of structured and unstructured information.
CEO Shai Agassi
The CEO designate of SAP Portals will be Shai Agassi, currently CEO, president and CTO of TopTier, whose vision has led TopTier into a leading position within the enterprise portal market and close cooperation with SAP. Before 1996, he served as vice president, business development of TopTier Israel (now a subsidiary of TopTier Software, Inc.). Agassi has co-founded two other software companies: Quicksoft Corp., a leader in the multimedia development marketing and distribution market in Israel, and Menahel, Inc., Israel’s leader in midmarket accounting software.
“As the most powerful player in the enterprise portal market, SAP Portals will deliver an open, innovative enterprise portal and information platform that quickly improves the bottom line of our customers,” Agassi said. “Our focused efforts will help companies to reach all enterprise communities, empower individuals and accelerate business for our customers.”
About SAP
SAP is the world’s leading provider of e-business software solutions. Through the mySAP.com® e-business platform, people in businesses around the globe are improving relationships with customers and partners, streamlining operations, and achieving significant efficiencies throughout their supply chains. Today, more than 13,000 companies in over 100 countries run more than 30,000 installations of SAP® software. With subsidiaries in over 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP".
