SAP Helps Customers Respond Quickly to Economic Downturn With Introduction of New Modular Business Suite

SAP® Business Suite 7 Reduces Upgrade Barrier and Provides Customers With a Higher Degree of Insight, Efficiency and Flexibility as Business Dynamics Change

NEW YORK : SAP AG (NYSE: SAP - News) today unveiled SAP® Business Suite 7 software, a next-generation software suite that helps businesses to optimize their performance and reduce IT cost. In the current environment, every organization is challenged to focus on short-term business value while preserving a coherent IT architecture and landscape. Recognizing this need, the new SAP Business Suite is designed to ease upgrades and help customers reduce IT costs with enhancement packages; gain stronger insights with select analytics capabilities from the SAP® BusinessObjects(TM) portfolio; and achieve end-to-end process excellence through the modular deployment of industry best practices and service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Leading analysts agree that such a modular, reduced-risk IT approach not only helps companies remain competitive in turbulent economic times, but also positions them to quickly capture business opportunities in the recovery.

"Today, large enterprises are skeptical of IT projects that involve foundational investments that aren't tied to delivering fast value to users," said Jeff Woods, managing vice president, ERP and SCM, Gartner. "Big projects that only promise a foundation for future value delivery are too risky, too costly, and the benefits are difficult to justify to business leaders. Enterprises want integrated IT solutions that require only investment that is tied to immediate business value--but without losing the cost, information integrity and process integrity benefits that a strategic suite provides."

Process Excellence Through Industry-Rich Value Scenarios

Developed in alignment with customers and partners, the new SAP Business Suite introduces industry-rich value scenarios -- end-to-end business processes that focus on industry-specific outcomes that span organizational boundaries and application silos. Value scenarios can be implemented in a step-wise fashion and deployed as customers need them.

Retailers, for example, understand that connecting with their customers is mission-critical. With the value scenario "inspired shopping experience," retail CEOs--along with their lines of business management--have the ability to better understand shoppers, anticipate their needs and shape the customer experience, as well as more effectively leverage point-of-sale operations, loyalty management, workforce management and product assortment and pricing.

Other examples of industry-rich value scenarios include "integrated product development" for discrete manufacturing industries, "collaborative demand and supply planning" for high tech and consumer products companies, and "integrated sourcing and procurement" for all industries.

Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is one of the world's leading research-focused healthcare groups in the fields of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. As a long-standing SAP customer, Roche will deploy the new SAP Business Suite.

"The software helps us to achieve cost savings through easier release management and to further broaden the functional support in areas like treasury, talent management and supply chain control," said Jennifer Allerton, CIO, Roche. "The ability to better support our Clinical Trial Management will speed up the introduction of new medicines for patients."

Helping to Reduce Cost and Risk in a Challenging Economy

To support customers in reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), the new SAP Business Suite delivers more than 150 functional innovations through enhancement packages and a synchronized release schedule for all applications--SAP(R) ERP, SAP(R) Customer Relationship Management, SAP(R) Supplier Relationship Management, SAP(R) Supply Chain Management and SAP(R) Product Lifecycle Management, as well as industry applications--across the entire suite. Enhancement packages allow customers to select and deploy only the functionality they need without upgrading their solution--leaving long implementations, upgrades and disintegrated point solutions in the past. With more than 1,000 live customers and 1,800 downloads, the first three generations of SAP enhancement packages for SAP ERP have proven the benefit of this innovative delivery model (see Nov. 12, 2008 press release, titled "Latest Enhancement Package from SAP Delivers Innovation and Value to Customers in Challenging Economic Times").

"SAP Business Suite software, with the synchronized release strategy and enhancement packages, will deliver value by fully supporting our integrated end-to-end business processes," said Ed Toben, SVP, GIT & Business Services, Colgate-Palmolive. "We anticipate that the enhancement package strategy will remove the upgrade barrier and help us to more efficiently deliver the innovation we need for continued success. With all components of SAP Business Suite on the same release cycle, the costs associated with implementation and testing of new functionality are greatly reduced."

SAP Business Suite customers can also drive down their TCO by leveraging the harmonized user interfaces that present similar views across the applications of SAP Business Suite to deliver a coherent user experience that helps to reduce user training effort and cost. SAP® Enterprise Support services further reduce the overall total cost of ownership of the new suite with integrated life-cycle management capabilities. Underpinned by SAP® Solution Manager, enterprise edition, SAP Enterprise Support accelerates innovation and reduces implementation cycles. With SAP Enterprise Support, customers receive direct advice from SAP solution architects and can minimize their modifications, enabling them to manage their ongoing operations in a cost-effective manner.

"SAP Business Suite 7 offers us powerful, differentiated industry-specific functionality and support for business processes, which furthers our strategy of IBM as a globally integrated enterprise by linking process excellence with our infrastructure capabilities," said John Leffler, Global SAP Practices Leader, IBM Global Business Services. "We are pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with SAP as mutual customers and partners. The combined efforts of SAP and IBM deliver superior value to our joint customers and we are looking forward to even more collaboration as companies continue to adopt and utilize the new SAP Business Suite 7."

Insight and Flexibility to Quickly Capture Business Opportunities

Insight and flexibility are essential in the current economic environment to capture new business opportunities, react fast to changing market conditions and drive competitive differentiation. The new SAP Business Suite delivers a higher degree of insight by incorporating select analytics capabilities of the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio, allowing customers to monitor execution and make sound decisions for positive change. The new SAP Business Suite is fully SOA-enabled and provides more than 2,800 enterprise services for all industries, giving customers enhanced flexibility. The SAP NetWeaver(R) Business Process Management component of the SAP NetWeaver(R) technology platform allows customers to build their own practices without sacrificing process integrity, allowing customers to further differentiate in their industry.

"With the new SAP Business Suite, customers are empowered to quickly embrace change and deploy only the solutions that matter most to their business," said Jim Hagemann Snabe, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. "With industry-rich, end-to-end processes and embedded analytics available in one, natively integrated suite, SAP has created a new industry standard that demonstrates our commitment to make software better, faster, more cost-effective and more user-friendly for our customers."