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Here comes the wave (officially): SAP AG’s third wave of its SAP CRM on-demand solutions, just made available and right on schedule according to the firm’s quarterly product roadmap.

The SAP service on-demand solution is designed to assist service managers in consolidating and tracking service tickets; in establishing rule-based escalation for follow-up; and in adhering to service-level agreements.

SAP also today unveiled additional capabilities for the extant SAP CRM on-demand solutions, including new sales automation features in areas of product support and quotation management.

The announcement was made at SaaScon 2006, currently going on in fantastic San Francisco, Calif.

RPG group firm Saregama India has announced its implementation of SAP software’s enterprise resource planning application software by SAP at Rs 4 crore (approximately US $870,000). The SAP will be implemented by Siemens and is expected to be completed within the current fiscal year.

Subroto Chattopadhyay, MD of Saregama, commented in a seeming aside that “Moreover, we are also focusing on the wireless format of music delivery. We are hosting an online marketplace for digital music and films.” This portal will be for online sale of music tracks by December.

And branching out even further from the ERP implementation realm, Saregama vice-chairman S Goenka said that the company has finalised a decision to produce three films at an estimated cost of Rs 20 crore (approximately US $4.35 million). The English-language film “Karma Confessions and Holi” will be released internationally in 2007, “keeping in mind the taste of the international market.”

IT solutions and services provider Ness Technologies, Inc. has announced that its Czech subsidiary, Ness Czech, will deliver a SAP-based ERP system to the Bulgarian division of Czech power utility CEZ. The new SAP-based ERP system will include modules for financial accounting, asset management, control, liquidity management, logistics, and data warehousing. The project is expected to be complete by January 1, 2007.

CEZ is the biggest electricity producer in the Czech Republic and also operates in other central and eastern European countries. CEZ owns three distribution companies in Bulgaria. Ness Technologies is a global provider of end-to-end IT services and solutions. Ness specializes in outsourcing and offshore; systems integration and application development; software and consulting; and quality assurance and training.

With 7,000 employees, Ness maintains operations in 15 countries, and is partnered with over 100 software and hardware vendors worldwide. Ness also calls itself “a traditional supplier of IT services for leading utility companies in Central and Eastern Europe.”

SAP Public Services, Inc. representatives have announced what thay call in the biz “a big win.” The state of North Carolina has selected SAP and BearingPoint to modernize and streamline its human resources and payroll operations. Entitled the Building Enterprise Access for North Carolina’s Core Operating Needs project, a.k.a. the BEACON Project, the state will use SAP’s flagship ERP application for more than 80,000 state employees.

BearingPoint will be responsible for implementation services. Responsible for the choice of mySAP ERP as backbone for North Carolina administrative functions was the State Controller’s office. Naturally, the state had innumerable independent programs functioning. Some were unbelievably over thirty years old. Through SAP software, North Carolina state seeks help in state employee turnover, recruitment and retention. The state reckons that access to benefits information and inter-agency job opportunities will be improved. Additionally, the state will provide employees with 24×7 access to their personal data with an online portal and will streamline employee record handling theoretically allowing state employees to easily transfer between state agencies and facilitate career growth. By consolidating multiple legacy systems onto mySAP ERP, the state hopes to automate virtually every system. The first phase of the implementation, in which SAP is delivering the software and BearingPoint is delivering implementation services, will focus on human resources and payroll applications and is expected to go live in early 2008. SAP Public Services, Inc., is a subsidiary of SAP America, Inc.

SAP is using the bully pulpit this week to make all sorts of statements and announcement, and the industry media is noting it all. As the international educational forum SAP TechEd ‘06 kicked off for the first of three installments in its third year of running, Las Vegas was a party for the SAPpers.

Capturing the most imaginations online, of course, was the simplest and most easily expressible notion: Namely, that SAP software would be receiving no major updates until 2010. The promise comes right from the horse’s mouth – SAP product and technology group president Shai Agassi – and reveals an interesting new strategy tack for the CRM crowd.

"…through 2010," said Agassi, "new functional enhancements to [mySAP] will be made available as extensions in a series of optional enhancement packages. These include: composites for new processes, an enhanced user experience, enterprise service definitions, enterprise services implementations providing industry-specific capabilities and technical enhancements. …this application will continue to provide a stable yet evolutionary business process platform as companies move into the era of enterprise SOA."

Agassi stated that SAP would instead release optional enhancement packages to mySAP ERP 2005 until the major upgrade four years from now. It is generally figured that the move is designed to encourage adoption of the company’s flagship software as the competition with Oracle Corporation intensifies.

Under the current business schema, SAP plans to have its business suite 100 percent service-enabled by 2007. Until then, SAP executives will urge customers to use the software vendor’s NetWeaver platform to begin piecing together a service-oriented architecture. With standard maintenance of SAP R/3 software set to expire at the end of this year, SAP executives are trying to convince their customers to begin upgrade projects now.

Along with the major announcement, Agassi also introduced the “Discovery System,” essentially a package of software components that allows SAP users to test a system design, creating services using Java-based tools.

A NetWeaver Composition Environment was also unveiled, packaging the Web Dynpro development environment and SAP Visual Composer. SAP executives tout the toolset for easing the building of custom composite applications.

SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment has been built upon existing familiar SAP tools and technologies already familiar to SAP developers, including the SAP composite application framework tool for service composition, the Web Dynpro development environment, and the SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer.

In theory, the environment should enable partners and customers to build and run composite applications spanning mySAP ERP 2005, SAP NetWeaver 2004s, and non-SAP applications and systems. The composition environment for SAP NetWeaver features Java EE 5, including the new persistence model provided by EJB 3.0 as well specifications related to composition such as Java API for XML-Based Web Services 2.0. The composition environment also leverages Eclipse 3.2, including the Eclipse web tools platform.

And last but by no means least, Agassi was on hand to deliver the opening keynote address. Agassi’s theme was on outlining the changing role of IT in the light of the shift to enterprise service-oriented architecture and how the IT community can accelerate innovation and value.

To frame everything, Agassi took a highly positive attitude in declaring that developers have the opportunity to create innovation at a pace, level and efficiency never thought possible before by taking a few critical steps. Agassi offered four steps “to prepare for the coming enterprise SOA evolution”: solidify your foundation, modernize your core, optimize business use, and drive strategic differentiation.

“Solidifying the foundation” refers to tidying in the IT realm: Necessary items to be ticked off the “to do” list include clean up and manage master data; consolidate business processes, instances and applications; map major and minor business events; assess IT skills and competencies; and consolidate hardware.

“Modernize your core” simply means to have a road map in place to upgrade. “Optimize business use” is a call for developers to simply the user experience (the Chump’s certainly down with this one).

“Drive strategic differentiation” got a bit more play from Agassi, who interestingly claimed that "more than 95 percent of business is common across all companies, in all industries.” This five percent difference is what provides the strategic differentiation that should be exploited, and ultimately run on an SOA system.

Agassi also feels that “During the coming year, it will become increasingly important to standardize around enterprise SOA definitions.”

In his keynote Agassi described a new category of experts inside companies whose focus is on business model innovation. Business process experts are individuals within an organization that are “managing new and unique business processes in order to differentiate their company in the market.” At SAP, said Agassi, is a distinct community in which business process experts can communicate and collaborate with one another, a community that has grown to more than 30,000 members within four months.

SAP TechEd ‘06 is a three-part ecosystem education event featuring lectures and hands-on sessions. The Las Vegas leg was this week; Tokyo will play host Oct. 5 and 6; Amsterdam, Oct. 18 to 20; and Bangalore, Nov. 8 to 10.

AMC Technology, L.L.C., a provider of multi-channel integration solutions for contact centers, today announced the general availability of application adapter mySAP 5.0 Interaction Center WinClient.

In supplement to existing AMC Technology solutions for SAP Interaction Center using SAP ICI or SAPphone, AMC’s new product adds an enhanced agent dashboard. The new solution leverages AMC’s Multi-Channel Integration Server and a wide variety of connectors from CTI vendors.

For customers currently using multi-channel interaction center functionality within CRM 4.0, AMC will offer an upgrade incentive.

Founded in 1995, AMC Technology, LLC, is a provider of multi-channel integration solutions that seek to assist contact centers in more efficiently managing customer interaction and customer service. AMC integration solutions are deployed with CRM application providers including SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Microsoft and contact center solution providers including Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel. AMC Technology is a privately held software development company headquartered in Richmond, Va.

Harte-Hanks Trillium Software today announced the integration between its TS Quality data quality software and the latest version of mySAP CRM 2005.

The Trillium software data quality connector is designed to provide integration of data quality processes for organizations using mySAP CRM. The Trillium Software System has been certified by SAP for integration via its business address services interface with SAP R/3 4.6 and higher versions.

Support of mySAP CRM builds on Harte-Hanks Trillium Software’s five-year history of integrating data profiling and data quality tools with mySAP CRM and other SAP applications. Today, Trillium Software supports mySAP ERP, as well as earlier versions of mySAP CRM.

"This announcement keeps two market leaders in step with each other," stated Len Dubois, vice president of marketing for Trillium Software at Harte-Hanks. Well, all right then.

San Antonio, Texas-based Harte-Hanks, Inc. is a worldwide direct and targeted marketing company that provides direct marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities.

Harte-Hanks Trillium Software provides businesses with solutions, technologies and services providing global data profiling; data cleansing, enhancement, and data linking for e-business; customer relationship management; enterprise resource planning; supply chain management; and data warehousing.

Back in Australia, the NSW Department of Commerce announced the completion of their two-week upgrade to the latest version of SAP’s enterprise resource planning software, MySAP 2005, as part of an ongoing drive to standardize their technology platforms.

The department implemented the upgrade under the terms of the SAP Ramp-Up program, a program designed for early users of relatively new product. The department of commerce was the first to perform the SAP upgrade within the state government, though basically all other departments will follow with the program. (Assuming, of course, no unforeseen disasters strike the upgraded system.)

According to the nice folks over at Australia’s ZDNet.com, the department of commerce has, since 2003, “decommissioned four data centres and formed a single personnel structure across its merged IM&T department.” Reportedly, a wide area network upgrade is underway, as this department boasts no fewer than 80 offices.

The reason for the single-system push is the actual formation of the department of commerce, a whole new department formed from the merger of several other agencies three years ago. Today, the department has 4,000 users of its ERP system.

According to ZD, the department will “take a cautious approach to adopting currently hyped technologies such as Windows Vista and voice over internet protocol telephony.” Said one department representative: “We’ve got no immediate plans to upgrade to Vista.”

At least one industry player will be working with a different title next week: Paul Ulyett has been named to the board of directors of Kyliptix Solutions Inc., a SaaS-based solutions provider. Currently, Ulyett is the president and founder of southern California’s Windsor Consulting.

Before going indie and creating his own firm, Ulyett ran up seven years at Oracle Corporation, ultimately reaching the position of marketing vice president. Prior his Oracle work, Ulyett was at Cognos Corporation.

These days, Ulyett wears a few hats. When not doing time as a Tech Biz Connection board member, he often serves as keynote speaker and presenter in events organized by the Direct Marketing Organization, the Software Council of Southern California, AeA, the International Association of Business Communicators and Tech Biz.

With headquarters in Irvine, Calif., privately held Kyliptix Solutions Inc. designs, develops, and markets web-based on-demand application management software for the small- and medium-sized business market.

Kyliptix prides itself its reported status as “the first company of its kind to adopt a utility-style, use-based billing model that eliminates the upfront investment associated with software acquisition.” The firm’s flagship product is KiBS CRM.

SAP representatives were pleased to announce that Indian sugar and ethanol manufacturing giant Bajaj Hindusthan Ltd. will be implementing SAP’s mySAP ERP software. mySAP ERP’s Financials, Operations and Human Capital Management solutions will be deployed in an effort to integrate and support business functions such as finance, procurement, logistics, materials, production, sales, and human resources.

The primary objective of the deployment, stated the SAP brain trust, is no less than “to optimize BHL’s entire supply chain, exercise greater control over the inventory and streamline discrete business processes for greater operational efficiency and business growth.”

IBM has been tapped to implement the system and will oversee deployment of the ERP; IBM will also provide training to the BHL IT team in order to handle post-implementation issues. The implementation is already underway, and BHL representatives are shooting for completion within nine months. Time is of the essence, as BHL has recently released plans to found a whopping seventeen sugar plants across UP in the coming months.