Business software needs YouTube jolt: SAP exec
SANTA CLARA, California (Reuters) - Corporate software need not come as complicated hairballs of code, but can work as simply as YouTube or Google Web search does, the chairman of SAP AG, Europe's largest software maker, said on Tuesday.
Speaking at the Software 2007 conference in Silicon Valley, Hasso Plattner, board chairman of SAP, described the German company's new approach to software design, aimed at attracting small business users, and due out later this year.
In March, SAP said it delayed the officially unannounced software, code-named "A1S", which it had begun testing with customers but said was not yet ready to market. Three years in the making, 3,000 engineers are working on it daily, he said.
Plattner envisions software where all the ugly code is hidden from the user and instead delivered as a set of packaged services, on-demand -- so-called Software as a Service, or SaaS. This is crucial for small businesses that can't afford the technical support costs needed to manage complex software.
Instead, some 2,500 features and services will be exposed for users to choose from simple menus, he said. Such features, or interfaces, to use the technical jargon, will be opened up so other software makers can plug their products into SAP's.
Office workers get instant access to all the information relevant to their jobs via personalized portals where they can select from a vast menu of features. Blogs, wikis, video-sharing -- all the latest Web tools will be offered.
NEW RELIGION
Instead of culling through endless databases to find instructions for how to perform some essential business task, office workers in the future will share how-to tips over the business equivalent of YouTube. "Nothing is better than showing a two-minute video of how (something) works," Plattner said.
He said advances in memory storage allow SAP to design software with vast amounts of data stored in instant-access memory, giving SAP users sub-second responses to data queries, and making complex information retrieval Google-like in speed.
The strategy borrows insights from smaller, but fast-growing rival Salesforce.com Inc., which helped pioneer how business software could be delivered over the Web rather than sold as separate packages for each desktop.
"They (Salesforce) have shown that this works," he said.
The new approach to software design will percolate into all future software SAP develops, for clients of all sizes, he added. Some customers may resist the Web-delivered approach, and SAP will continue to offer alternatives, he said.
As co-founder, Plattner has overseen multiple reinventions of SAP since he helped found it in 1972 -- from mainframes to the client/server era of personal computers to the Internet age -- where software can be delivered as a service over the Web.
For too long, Plattner said, enterprise software programs -- the tools used to manage information in big organizations -- have been designed around the demands of big corporate customers rather than small businesses or office workers themselves.
"This is completely different from how people work," Plattner acknowledged. "We were so concentrated on the requirements that the companies need as opposed to what the users need," Plattner said.
Two-thirds, or more than 26,000 of SAP's 39,000 corporate customers, fall in the small or medium-sized business category, with the remainder major companies ranging from China's Lenovo to Procter & Gamble of the United States to Mercedes-Benz.
