New Products:
Solutions to Meet Real-World Business Needs

Driven by the challenges our customers face today and the new opportunities on the horizon, our research focus areas are reflected in the new products launched in 2006: We delivered landmark achievements with several initiatives designed to empower information workers at all levels of their organizations – professionals from administrators, to financial analysts, to CEOs who use software and technology to perform business operations, improve productivity, and maintain communications – by helping them to access information more easily and extract insight from throughout the enterprise.

Duet Software
The year 2006 saw the landmark launch of Duet software for Microsoft Office and SAP, a joint product that enables employees to interact quickly and easily with SAP business processes and data through Microsoft Office applications. Building on enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA), Duet forges a strong link between the back office and the desktop. Duet enables information workers to perform their daily work more efficiently by allowing them to access their organization’s SAP data through Microsoft desktop productivity tools. The two companies will release additional business scenarios in Duet during 2007, including support for purchasing management and recruiting.

Analytical Solutions
In 2006, SAP delivered business intelligence (BI) and analytics products that enable unparalleled simplicity and speed in putting business insight at the fingertips of decision makers and information workers. We launched more than 100 analytic composites – applications that feed timely and actionable insight to better guide the decisions and actions of users across all levels of the enterprise. The software’s intuitive interface enables users to quickly tap the power of analytics and to easily customize or create their own analytic “dashboards.” We also collaborated with Intel to co-develop the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator, an innovative analytical engine proven to increase the speed of analyzing critical business information up to 200-times faster than alternative tools. The product effectively resolves the traditional tradeoff between speed and flexibility, helping businesses make faster decisions that increase revenue opportunities and reduce costs.

Solutions for Governance, Risk, and Compliance
Effective governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) management requires a tightly integrated solution set on a single platform to address multiple initiatives. SAP is the first company to bring all of this together in a single business unit and solution portfolio. SAP solutions for GRC empower our customers to take a holistic approach to governance and compliance, helping them reduce risk and cost, and enhance business transparency, predictability, control, and performance. 

With the acquisition of Virsa, a leading provider of compliance solutions, we enriched our existing portfolio of solutions addressing compliance demands from the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act to international trade controls and from emissions standards to environment, health, and safety regulations. We also entered into a joint marketing agreement with Cisco Systems in the United States and Canada to address GRC business processes and IT control issues across the entire IT hardware and software infrastructure.

SAP CRM On-Demand Solution
In early 2006, SAP set a new milestone in innovation with the latest version of SAP customer relationship management (CRM) – the industry’s first CRM solution to offer both on-demand and on-premise deployment models. With the SAP CRM on-demand solution options, companies gain the flexibility to take advantage of world-class CRM functionality where and when they need it. They can quickly empower their customer-facing operations with an easy-to-use solution delivered directly via the Internet, offered through a subscription-based licensing model. As business needs evolve, companies can transition from on-demand to hybrid and on-premise SAP CRM at any time, avoiding data loss or interruptions to productivity.

The initial launch of the SAP CRM on-demand solution included an on-demand sales function to help companies manage their customers, contacts, and sales pipelines. Additional on-demand function were rolled out at regular intervals throughout the year: a marketing on-demand function to help segment and target customers more effectively as well as track and pursue promising leads; and a service on-demand function to support service managers in answering customer requests, adhering to service level agreements and improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.