A2i Buy Will Boost SAP's Content and Information Management
20 July 2004
Yvonne Genovese   Andrew White  Billy Maynard
The acquisition of A2i and its platform for managing product data will better enable SAP to manage domain-specific data in demanding global operations. However, SAP must still do more to catch up with the leaders in this area.

Market Share: Business Intelligence Software, Asia/Pacific, 2002
19 April 2004
Louisa Liu   Fabrizio Biscotti  Colleen Graham
In 2002, the business intelligence software market grew 3.5 percent to $88.37 million. Australia accounted for 31 percent of new license revenue, followed by South Korea and Singapore with 15 percent each.

SAP's Business One Gains Manufacturing From SoftBrands
6 April 2004
Robert P. Anderson   Pranav Kumar
SAP and SoftBrands will partner to integrate Fourth Shift and Demand Stream with Business One. This will bolster the market credibility of Business One, while providing broader exposure to SoftBrands' offerings.

Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, 2004
30 March 2004
Gene Phifer   Ray Valdes   David Gootzit   Kim S. Underwood
Joanne M. Correia   Whit Andrews  
The segmentation of the portal product market has moved slowly. Because most enterprises still request "a portal" and most vendors still sell a "portal product," we have updated the single-segment Magic Quadrant.

Sales Magic Quadrant and MarketScopes: 1H04 Overview
23 March 2004
Robert P. Desisto 
Although Siebel leads in the Customer Relationship Management Sales Suite Magic Quadrant, Oracle and SAP are challenging its position. In addition, many best-of-breed vendors offer compelling solutions.

Magic Quadrant for European SAP Consulting Services, 2004
19 March 2004
Nicole France  Derek Prior
When upgrading SAP systems, selecting the right external service provider is vital. Our Magic Quadrant rates their SAP know-how, vision, change management skills and industry expertise.

Magic Quadrant for Learning Management Systems, 1H04
18 March 2004
James Lundy   Waldir Arevolo De Azevedo Filho  
Enterprises eventually will need an e-learning suite, but for now, they're still looking to deploy a learning management system as their primary e-learning software application.

Magic Quadrant for E-Learning Suites, 2004
15 March 2004
James Lundy   Waldir Arevolo De Azevedo Filho  
Enterprises are recognizing the value of e-learning suites and starting to make suite functionality part of their evaluation criteria.

Magic Quadrant for Business-to-Consumer CRM Suites
12 March 2004
Gareth Herschel   John Radcliffe   Kimberly Collins   Michael Maoz
Siebel Systems remains a leader in the B2C Customer Relationship Management Magic Quadrant. E.piphany and PeopleSoft are visionaries. Despite progress, Amdocs, Chordiant Software, Oracle and SAP remain niche vendors.

MarketScope: E-Service Suites, 1H04
27 February 2004
Esteban Kolsky  
The e-service suite vendor offerings have evolved into well-integrated suites of functionality. Choose vendors based on today's benefits, with an eye on how the players will best enable the customer interaction hub of tomorrow.

MarketScope: Customer Service Contact Center Software, 1H04
26 February 2004
Michael Maoz  
The new generation of customer service contact center software applications offers a reasonable alternative to homegrown, custom-built applications.

BI Tools Software: Stand-Alone and Composite Views Explained
25 February 2004
Fabrizio Biscotti   Colleen Graham   Louisa Liu  
A shift is occurring in the business intelligence market as vendors are producing tools that are being sold as additional functionality embedded in products not traditionally classified as business intelligence.

MarketScope: Expense Management Software
24 February 2004
James Holincheck  
Expense management solutions have proven benefits, but clients must understand the strengths, weaknesses and positioning of vendors to make good decisions.

MarketScope: Customer Relationship Marketing, 1Q04
19 February 2004
Gareth Herschel   John Radcliffe  
E.piphany, Teradata and Unica have Positive ratings, whereas DoubleClick and SAS Institute are rated Promising for their interesting visions, but slower adoption rates. Users should use Caution as they evaluate other solutions.

Magic Quadrant for Marketing Resource Management, 2004
18 February 2004
Kimberly Collins  
Aprimo remains the Leader in the MRM Magic Quadrant; Oracle and SAP remain as Challengers. SmartPath, Veridiem, Elateral and Unica are Visionaries. Carefully evaluate the viability and functionality of Niche Players.

How Four Top Software Vendors Are Embracing SOBAs
16 February 2004
Charles Abrams   Whit Andrews   Yvonne Genovese   Jeff Comport
Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP and Siebel are making services-oriented business applications key elements in their products. Niche application vendors may be slower to react, even though Web services are becoming mainstream.

Magic Quadrant for CRM Field Service Management, 2004
3 February 2004
Michael Maoz  
Superior field service management will drive profits in key industries, yet only one vendor leads, none challenge, large-enterprise application vendors have immature offerings and small specialists face economic challenges.

Magic Quadrant for CRM B2B Large-Enterprise Suites, 2004
29 January 2004
Robert P. Desisto  Michael Maoz
Business-to-business customer relationship management suites are changing to handle extraenterprise partner relationships. Leading CRM suites can serve as the backbone for this broader range of B2B relationships.

Magic Quadrant for CRM Sales Suite Vendors, 2004
28 January 2004
Robert P. Desisto  Joe Galvin
Siebel Systems continues to lead, Oracle has improved its execution, and SAP holds its challenger position in the customer relationship management sales suite market Magic Quadrant.

MarketScope: Direct Sales Technologies, 1H04
28 January 2004
Joe Galvin  
Direct sales technologies have matured to the point of functional commoditization. Market leaders are best able to address a wide variety of complex issues for sales processes, roles and structures.

MarketScope: Sales Incentive Compensation, 1H04
28 January 2004
Joe Galvin  
The sales incentive compensation market is poised for growth. Best-of-breed vendors Callidus, Synygy and Centive maintain their functional superiority over enterprise application vendors Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft and SAP.

Find the Right Strategy to Secure Your SAP Systems
28 November 2003
Alain Dang Van Mien  
There are many ways to secure SAP applications, but most are hard to maintain and the most effective are expensive. Which one is right for you depends on how secure your data needs to be and on how your system is set up.

How SAP Customers Can Beat the 'Post-Deployment Blues'
9 July 2003
Brian Zrimsek   Derek Prior  
SAP customers can overcome challenges related to application support, performance, upgrade and expansion by taking several key post-implementation steps.

Adapt to SAP's Evolving Environment
9 July 2003
Yvonne Genovese   Derek Prior   Gene Phifer   Karen Peterson  
SAP customers should stay abreast of the mega-vendor's evolving product and technology road map, and follow our advice for a smoother ride toward becoming real-time enterprises.

Special Report
Navigating SAP's Product and Technology Layers
9 July 2003
Betsy Burton   Yvonne Genovese
For SAP prospects and customers, the ability to address tactical and strategic concerns requires in-depth knowledge of the vendor's offerings and technologies, and how to map them into current business strategies. Based on our observations, there is an overall lack of SAP resources available to assist enterprises in this daunting task

Can SAP Win the Hearts and Minds of Developers?
7 July 2003
Derek Prior   Gene Phifer
The new NetWeaver technology stack proclaims SAP's determination to establish itself as a software infrastructure vendor. The first step will be to convince developers SAP can compete alongside IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

SAP Business One: Capable of Challenging SMB Leaders?
17 June 2003
Robert Anderson   Karen Peterson
Because of challenges in developing a small and midsize business partner channel, SAP's Business One, while encouraging, probably won't become a major low-end enterprise resource-planning competitor until 2006.

SAP mySAP CRM Sales Solutions
21 May 2003
Rochelle Shaw
SAP's mySAP CRM 3.1 features an upgraded interface; the suite's sales functionality is broken down into modules called Enterprise Sales, TeleSales, Field Sales and E-Selling.

SAP BW: Real-World Experiences and Best Practices
14 May 2003
Ted Friedman   Frank Buytendijk   Derek Prior
SAP customers will be driven to deploy Business Information Warehouse as part of their business intelligence architecture. The benefits and challenges experienced to date are references for what BW project teams can expect.

SAP WMS Will Become a Contender in 2005
6 May 2003
Jeff Woods
Account control in "SAP shops" -- combined with SAP's global presence, momentum and viability -- and a few key wins are positioning the company to become a strong contender in the warehouse management system market.

SAP Plans to Mine More Revenue From Its Installed Base
15 April 2003
Alexa Bona   Derek Prior
License agreements more creatively to generate further revenue. Gartner answers important questions from SAP clients about this strategy.

SAP's New SMB Offering Won't Challenge Market Leaders
4 April 2003
Robert Anderson   Yvonne Genovese
SAP has launched its Business One offering for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) in the United States. It will interest small divisions of large SAP customers but won't challenge the leaders in the SMB market any time soon.

SAP mySAP CRM Marketing Solutions
4 April 2003
Rochelle Shaw
mySAP CRM 3.1 features an upgraded interface; the suite's marketing functionality includes campaign management, personalization, analytics, e-mail marketing, Web content management and lead management.

SAP's Ambitious Approach To Project Portfolio Management
24 March 2003
Ted Kempf
As it launches mySAP Professional Services, SAP says it intends to be the No. 1 provider of project portfolio management solutions to the global market by the end of 2004.

Asia/Pacific: CRM, an Insight Into Complex
4 March 2003
Pranav Kumar   Dickson Tang   Yanna Dharmasthira   Nanta Photduang
The Asia/Pacific CRM market will rebound strongly in 2004, driven by economic recovery, increased competition and market maturity. To benefit, vendors must understand that each market has unique drivers.

CIO Update: The Impact of SAP Products on Enterprise Architecture
26 February 2003
Derek Prior
Gartner's enterprise architecture framework is a powerful planning tool. When applying the framework, however, enterprises deploying SAP business applications must know the constraints that SAP products and technologies bring.

Who Sets the Pace in the SAP Performance 'Olympics'?
24 February 2003
Derek Prior
SAP and its hardware vendors use many different application performance benchmarks. But records for these R/3 benchmark tests do not stand for long and vendors favor different benchmarks, so comparing results is hard.

SAP Projects Strong Knowledge Management Message
12 November 2002
Debra Logan   Mark Gilbert   Gene Phifer   Nikos Drakos
SAP offers content management, collaboration, e-learning and information retrieval capabilities via mySAP portal. But is it knowledge management?

SAP's Web Software Will Likely Challenge Rivals and Supporters
14 June 2002
Massimo Pezzini
SAP will now ship mySAP Technology, the foundation for mySAP.com. Consequently, SAP's competitors, partners and customers will have to take various actions.

India and China Offer SAP Different Advantages
4 June 2002
Pranav Kumar   Dion Wiggins
SAP's development efforts in China and India illustrate the importance of considering the unique strengths of each country, and not just the countries' costs and skill levels.

SAP R/3 Enterprise: Stable to Its Core
25 April 2002
Yvonne Genovese   Derek Prior
The R/3 Enterprise message is resonating throughout SAP's R/3 installed base, affecting upgrade planning for SAP life cycle strategies. Customers must understand the functionality, architecture and licensing issues involved.

SAP Consolidation Step Good News for Most Customers
23 April 2002
Derek Prior   Gene Phifer   Yvonne Genovese
Recombining SAP Portals and SAP Markets with parent SAP makes sense for customers and SAP. However, selling to non-SAP customers will become harder because they will likely view it as a step in the proprietary direction.

Americas 2002 SAP ERP External Service Providers MQ
13 March 2002
Pat Phelan   Brian Zrimsek   Frances Karamouzis
Gartner introduces the SAP external service provider Magic Quadrant, which assesses the global enterprise resource planning capabilities of the major North American SAP systems integrators as of February 2002.

SAP: Surprisingly Transformed but Even More Confusing
1 March 2002
Bruce A. Bond
SAP has transformed itself into a more-flexible vendor with more-flexible products. However, the resulting confusion could cause users to make SAP strategic planning and deployment mistakes.

ERP II SAP/Oracle Escalation Wake-up Call
14 February 2002
Derek Prior   Betsy Burton  
Some enterprises with large-scale SAP/Oracle systems have experienced an Oracle DBMS bug, which has exposed problems with the vendors' support escalation processes. We provide advice on how to avoid downtime.

Understanding the mySAP CRM 3.0 Technical Architecture
12 February 2002
Derek Prior   Ed Thompson  
SAP's mySAP CRM 3.0 solves a more complex business problem than R/3, so it has a more complex architecture. It blends old and new technologies across multiple channels, integrating heterogeneous business applications.

Customer Satisfaction With SAP's Product Support Service
8 February 2002
Derek Prior
More Gartner clients are reporting poor customer satisfaction with SAP's product support service. SAP customers must learn to maximize the effectiveness of this critical life cycle support service.

New Australian Research Center Should Benefit SAP Customers
27 November 2001
Kristian Steenstrup
SAP's formation of technology research centers in Brisbane and elsewhere in the world signals a stronger focus on global research and development. This strategic shift should benefit SAP, governments and customers alike.

SAP Challenges Integration Middleware Vendors
13 November 2001
Massimo Pezzini   Jeff Comport   Derek Prior
SAP's new mySAP Technology for open integration clarifies its middleware strategy and threatens some middleware vendors. Certain customers with upcoming application integration projects should evaluate the product.

Supporting Java Will Mean Evolution, not Revolution, for SAP
8 November 2001
Massimo Pezzini   Jeff Comport   Derek Prior
SAP's support for Java will benefit customers. Early adopters of SAP's new Java applications should ensure performance doesn't suffer compared with those developed for SAP's proprietary ABAP environment.

SAP and PeopleSoft 3Q Results Should Encourage Customers
24 October 2001
Jenni Lehman   Bruce Bond
SAP's and PeopleSoft's third-quarter 2001 earnings reports indicate that both vendors remain strong and will likely continue to increase their lead over other enterprise business application vendors in 2002.

Piloting an SAP Enterprise Portal
7 September 2001
Derek Prior
SAP's Workplace enterprise portal was released 10 "Internet years" ago. Product experiences so far are largely positive, and carefully planned pilot schemes will lead to successful deployment.

SAP APO: Stronger Than the Market Perception
21 August 2001
Karen Peterson
SAP APO is still trying to capture "mind share" in the growing SCM market. Based on recent reviews of product functionality, its execution is stronger than the market's perception of it.

Why Is SAP Doing Well When the Market Is Not?
20 August 2001
Bruce Bond
SAP's 2Q01 results bucked the trend of lackluster financial results from technology enterprises in general and business application software vendors in particular. How is this possible?

SAP mySAP CRM 3.0: The Giant Awakes
17 August 2001
Ed Thompson
CRM 3.0 can be run independently of R/3 and fills many functionality gaps, but improvements will be needed to expand beyond the SAP installed base.

Sapphire U.S. 2001: A Change in SAP's Stripes
23 July 2001
Yvonne Genovese   Kenneth Brant   Lora Cecere   Lee Geishecker   Karen Peterson   Brian Zrimsek   Bruce Bond
The big excitement at Sapphire '01 was SAP's evolution toward ERP II and c-commerce and its open integration vision; however, enterprises should question the short-term reality of such concepts.