SAP develops Salesforce and Google Wave rivals

Being a traditional software giant, SAP doesn't implement projects quickly. For years the company develops strategic plans, makes presentations, creates prototypes and test new products internally. That's why, we still haven't seen any working SaaS or Enterprise 2.0 solution by SAP. But they make a lot promises. Recently, SAP announced that it develops two fundamental products that will compete with Salesforce CRM and Google Wave. Regarding CRM system, we only known that it will be a SaaS solution built on multi-tenant architecture (like Salesforce). It is planned that the system will become profitable in late 2010, so it must be unveiled in the first half of the next year.

Unlike the promised CRM, the Google Wave competitor already has a name - Constellation. And even the closed demo for this product codenamed 12Sprints is available. The main Constellation's objective - is to support decision-making process. The product provides a workspace where colleagues can communicate in real time, add content and (most importantly) retrieve data from ERP and other business applications. The main Constellation delivery scheme is SaaS, but the on-premise version will be also available. The system will be integrated with Google Wave, Sharepoint and other platforms. Furthermore, SAP promises to create a marketplace, where developers can sell their Constellation connectors for various business applications.



Recently SAP showed great interest towards Google Wave. The company has created at least 2 plug-ins for this system. The first (called Gravity - see image) is a widget of the SAP Business Process Management that allows to collaborate on business processes in Google Wave. The second is a Google Wave bot, that can retrieve order information from SAP on-the-fly when the order number is entered.

SAP Constellation is expected in the first half of 2010. Recently the Google Wave for Enterprise prototype was also presented by Novell.

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