August 13, 2008SAP closes the gaps around ERP

Application maker expands product range to plug the gaps between analysis and execution, and between organisations

With a 25% share of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market, German application-maker SAP can reasonably claim responsibility for the nuts and bolts that underpin global business. Its core ERP software is for many of the world’s largest corporations the engine of enterprise.

But historically, those systems that sit apart from the engine room – such as business intelligence (BI) and business process management (BPM) – have not been seen as SAP’s heartland.

At the company’s Sapphire 2008 user conference in Berlin, however, SAP presented a concerted push to remove that degree of separation. It sought to bring analysis and process management into the fold of ERP while making the ERP platform the medium for collaboration.

SAP’s most explicit display of this desire has been its acquisition of BI vendor Business Objects, announced in October 2007. By linking BI directly into the ERP system, SAP argues, the gap between analysis and execution is eliminated, creating a ‘closed loop’ of performance management.

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