SAP Influencer Summit, Dispatch 3: Summarizing E-Sourcing On-Demand Themes

While I plan to provide additional details on some of what I learned around SAP's On-Demand E-Sourcing developments (from pricing to modular component break-out information), not to mention providing some context around how customers currently use SAP E-Sourcing, I thought I'd take a quick minute to summarize some of the key themes from this morning's presentation. In no particular order, here are some of the top things that jumped out as being of particular importance:

First, SAP is offering a new On-Demand supplier-management product. Really not too much new here, from a functional perspective; rather, it's much of the previous On-Demand workflow and supplier-management technology repackaged as a distinctive offering. Still, the fact that SAP is tossing its hat into the supplier information-management (SIM) ring is worthy of note and analysis.

Second, SAP is becoming far more transparent with new E-Sourcing pricing (including sourcing, contracts, and supplier management) than before. More on the details later.

Third, integration is a huge theme of On-Demand. In fact, SAP is positioning the integration capabilities of E-Sourcing On-Demand as one of the major competitive advantages of the application (again, more on this later).

Fourth, SAP is taking an "as you like it" approach to serving up SaaS with both multi- and single-tenant offerings.

And fifth, SAP strongly emphasized that it's trying to break down all barriers to working with it, down to allowing a single seat license for a number of months just to get started, not to mention a range of affordable enabling services. Sound like the SAP of old? No way. Clearly, SAP is moving in new, more flexible directions (or at least trying to).

Stay tuned in the coming days for analysis of these and other points I picked up at SAP's Influencer Summit.

- Jason Busch