SAP, Yahoo! set to forge partnership

SAP and Yahoo! will form a far-reaching partnership to extend both companies’ leadership in the rapidly growing enterprise portal market, according to company representatives.

Under the agreement, the companies will work together to develop a joint enterprise portal and market it directly to their customers and through their respective sales channels.

SAP Portals, a just-formed SAP subsidiary devoted to creating enterprise portals and information solutions, will work with both SAP and Yahoo! to provide what SAP Philippines marketing and alliance manager Marivic Gamo characterizes as "an unparalleled combination of an enterprise portal platform and open access to applications, services and rich personalized external content."

Together, SAP and Yahoo! aim to deliver a state-of-the-art enterprise portal solution that will enable companies to improve productivity and create efficiencies by providing employees, customers and partners with a single place to access all the information, applications and services they need from both internal and external sources.

"The joint enterprise portal solution provides both stickiness and empowerment," Gamo said.

The combined solution is intended to leverage Yahoo!’s position as the No. 1 most visited web site in the workplace according to Nielsen//NetRatings latest rankings as well as SAP’s leadership in the e-business solutions market.

"The enterprise portal built by Yahoo! and SAP will be a natural extension of what both companies already do well: provide scalable and customized-content and solutions on a global basis with the individual in mind. It will provide people with a single point of access to information, applications and services from both SAP and Yahoo!, as well as third-party components, including e-business applications and services, online exchanges, enterprise content and global Internet content available in 12 languages from Yahoo’s 2,000 content and service providers," Gamo explained.

According to Yahoo! Inc. chairman and chief executive officer Tim Koogle, this agreement will further solidify Yahoo!’s position as a major player in the enterprise portal market, and advances the Yahoo! Platform that has been adopted by major companies, including McDonald’s, Honeywell and Seagate Technology.

"Working in tandem with SAP, we see a tremendous opportunity to extend our platform through delivering the joint enterprise portal solution through our combined channels," Koogle said.

Meanwhile, Hasso Plattner, CEO and co-founder of SAP AG, noted that the combination of SAP and Yahoo! will provide the best solution for all companies in terms of content, scalability and application integration. "Ours will be the best available enterprise portal that combines robust content and functionality with an intuitive user interface. We expect the joint product will be the enterprise portal of choice for business," he said.

SAP Philippines managing director Anthony Gatt said the vision of SAP and Yahoo! for enterprise portals is aligned to provide employees as well as the extended business community of customers, partners, suppliers and other stakeholders with convenient access to the resources they need to manage the immense flow of business information, processes and transactions.

The new enterprise portal will provide interactive information, application and process services to support people in the new e-business work force.

"The enterprise portal will leverage role-based personalization so people can view information that is important and relevant to them. The content will be determined by their roles within their organization, with services and applications based on their tasks and responsibilities. In addition, people will be able to customize content to meet their unique needs and preferences," Gatt said.