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SAP Business All-in-One, an alluring name. Only time will tell if this ERP system that targets mid-sized manufacturing companies can live up to the name of being an “all-in-one”.

The system is available preconfigured with best practices and offers an end-to-end solution for mid-sized businesses that are keen to enhance their competitiveness in a global environment.  The application is SAP NetWeaver technology and is both flexible and comprehensive. Functions include best practices for marketing, sales and service, with integrated analytics, to end-to-end opportunity management, telesales and service, returns management, and real-time reporting.

AGL Energy, an Australian energy company, announced today that it’s integrating its Avaya contact center and SAP Customer Relationship Management systems with middleware technology from AMC Technology. The integration process will involve deploying additional Avaya technology that includes the Avaya Interaction Center, an Avaya Voice Response system as well as NICE Perform call recording deployed by NSC Enterprise Solutions, Avaya’s largest partner in Australia.

The AMC middleware will allow the placing of customized pop-up windows inside the SAP windows client interface so that one can view real time agent state and call control information.

AG announced that South Africa’s Office of the Public Protector has selected an SAP product to transform its case management operations, automating its manually driven investigations, reviews, analysis and reporting processes. The office, an independent and impartial constitutional institution, conducts investigations into alleged improper conduct by state organizations.

The SAP package in question is the SAP Investigative Case Management for Public Sector package, based on the SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) application and the SAP NetWeaver technology platform. OPP can now introduce automation in the core processes related to dispute resolution.

Given that the enterprise market is pretty saturated and renewing licenses is pretty much only way to make money off the big companies; it is not surprising that software vendors are looking to target the mid-market segment.The growth of SaaS has been a major factor in driving the attention of companies like SAP and Oracle towards SMBs.

SAP started offering MySAP CRM as a hosted service around two years ago. The company fell behind Salesforce.com and many other pure SaaS players, partly because of the delay in bringing out Business ByDesign. Yet, SAP has kept up its efforts in the SaaS CRM arena and in the recently concluded SAPPHIRE user conference, it announced new CRM functionality in its Business All-in-One solution for medium-sized companies.

SAP’s ambitious Business ByDesign venture has run into another roadblock. The ERP and CRM suite touted by SAP to be the mother of all SaaS offerings has been pushed back by SAP by another six months so that the company can pay more attention to issues such as reining in the TCO and developing a proper user interface. The delay was too good a chance for SaaS leader Salesforce.com to let go and Steve Russel was quoted as saying that the rate at which Business ByDesign was progressing, it would always remain the “future” of SAP. SAP reiterated its commitment towards SaaS and denied cutting back on investments in the on-demand field.

Although SAP has missed the SaaS bus, the company does not feel that it has lost prospective customers to competitors - traditional or SaaS.

SAP and RIM have come together in order to tap into each other competencies and in the process develop mobile CRM applications that can be made available to an increasing population carrying portable devices.

Mobile professionals with the new “Crackberry” handheld device can access SAP software from anywhere in the world. SAP says that it expects its CRM application to be integrated with the device over the next few months, with more of its business applications, such as enterprise resource planning and supply chain management suites, to follow suite afterwards.

It is a telling statement on CRM usage that company employees often prefer to continue with the software they have been using for account management instead of shifting to CRM deployments instituted by the company.

SAP has taken cognizance of this fact and in an effort to increase usage among workers, it has announced an update to its CRM software, which will now feature a Web 2.0-style interface. SAP ’s Vice President of CRM product management Stefan Haenisch hopes to fulfill customer expectations regarding ease of use. The lack of employee buy-in into expensive CRM deployments can result in delayed ROI.

It is a sign of the impact that Web 2.0 applications have had on consumer behavior that even enterprise applications are now being redesigned such that their user interfaces satisfy customer expectations regarding ease of use from business software.

Oracle probably has the broadest set of CRM capabilities, thanks to its acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft, said Vuk Trifkovic, an analyst with Datamonitor in the U.K. “But I don’t think that reflects badly on SAP, they have good tools with a lot of features, and they’re a natural for anyone in the SAP ecosystem,” he said.

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The news about Oracle today is reading like a press-release version of that 2001 Japanese cinema classic, Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.

The software behemoths aren’t destroying Tokyo with fire breath and the like, but there is a lot of bellowing and stomping going on involving three of the biggest names in the biz.

Computer World is running a bit more on the software lawsuit of the year, i.e. Oracle v. SAP AG, with SAP reportedly now hoping to settle with the big O. Oracle v. SAP, a case “about corporate theft on a grand scale, committed by the largest German software company,” in the opening words of the complaint.

Oracle originally brought the lawsuit against SAP in the US Federal District Court in the Northern District of California on March 22. The lawsuit alleged that King Ghidorah – i mean, SAP was guilty of violations to the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, Unfair Competition, Intentional and Negligent Interference with Prospective Economic Advantage and Civil Conspiracy, i.e. they ripped off Oracle data. Read more

SAP got bigger today, announced the acquisition of enterprise communications software developer Wicom Communications and the planned buyout of identity management applications maker MaXware.

Strategically speaking, the former move is meant to bolster SAP’s customer relationship management software, while the latter is designed to increase SAP identity management capabilities in NetWeaver.

SAP completed its Wicom acquisition last week and expects to close its MaXware deal this month. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Wicom, based in Finland, develops CRM software that integrates with SAP’s existing contact center application, SAP Interaction Center.

Norway-based MaXware has about 300 customers in such industries as manufacturing, business services, defense, energy, health care, financial services and government.

SAP AG today announced its intention to acquire OutlookSoft Corporation, a privately held provider of integrated planning, budgeting, forecasting and consolidation software. The acquisition is expected to be completed in June 2007, pending approval from the respective antitrust authorities. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The prospective buyout is part of the SAP multi-year plan to “holistically address the increasingly sophisticated requirements of the CFO around driving business performance, managing risk, ensuring compliance and spearheading financial transformation in their organizations.” SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence will provide the robust BI infrastructure powering the OutlookSoft 5 application.

Seeking to address performance management, OutlookSoft was founded in 1999 to deliver solutions for the CFO (“Solutions for the CFO” – not a bad tagline…) in leveraging Web 2.0 technologies. OutlookSoft recorded revenue growth of 25 percent in 2006 and today 700 customers use OutlookSoft. Headquartered in Stamford, Conn., OutlookSoft employs approximately 250 people and has offices in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland and Italy.