By David Gewirtz
Mention enterprise solutions and you're going to hear the name SAP, the third largest software company in the world. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz had the opportunity to sit down with Howard Beader, SAP's Director of Mobile Business, for this exclusive PalmPower Interview.DG:
Can you give us some background about SAP?
HB:SAP has been around for about 25 years. We are now the third largest software company in the world. Our specialty is in enterprise computing. Basically, any application that an enterprise needs to run its business is delivered by SAP. So, we cover not only the historical ERP (Enterprise Research Product), which is what many customers have known us for, in the past, but also CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SCM (Supply Chain Management), and BI (Business Intelligence) with our data warehousing product.
"Palm is one of the most important partners that we're working with today in the mobile space."
Our newest offering and probably our biggest news of late is our portal offering, via SAP Portals. It's a new company that we just formed through an acquisition of a company called TopTier, which was one of the leading visionaries in the portal space and a strategic partner with Yahoo!. So now, SAP Portals and Yahoo! go to market together with one enterprise portal offering.
But what we're going to be talking about today is SAP Mobile Business and our products within that and how that fits within the world of enterprise computing.
"SAP is really about business cooperation between the different functional areas."
DG:
Tell us about your role at SAP and what your areas of responsibility are.
HB:Basically, in the Americas, all product management, development, product marketing, marketing communications, and so on, feed into my team for coordination of all our mobile business aspects. So, although my team does not have direct responsibility for sales, because our different regions do that, we do work with sales. We support our customers, both from a first customer shipment standpoint, all the way through to insuring that they're happy and reference-able users of Mobile Business.
DG:SAP is very much a global business, isn't it?
HB:Yes. SAP is headquartered, globally, in Germany, where most of our development actually occurs today. From a mobile perspective, it gives us a much more global view on things than most of our competitors within this space. We have a development team in Germany, a development team in Israel, a development team in India, and a development team in Tokyo, as well as here in the Americas. We have a global view on what's happening from a technology standpoint.
