On February 4, 2009, SAP unveiled SAP Business Suite 7, a next-generation software suite that helps businesses to optimize their performance and reduce IT cost. The press conference included remarks from SAP co-CEO Léo Apotheker and Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP Executive Board Member, Business Solutions & Technology. In addition to the executive presentations and a product demo, the press conference featured a customer panel with high-level executives from major Fortune 500 companies and a question-and-answer session.
Business Suite 7 represents a new way of software deployment more than a features upgrade. With the new approach, SAP said it’s doing away with its conventional upgrade process for software applications. SAP Business Suite 7 represents the most current versions of SAP’s business applications, including those for managing supply chains, product life cycles, customer relationship, among others. Once upgraded, customers won’t have to do a full upgrade for five years.
SAP is syncing all of its improvements to its applications so that they’ll all be available at the same time. Customers will then be able to pick and choose from the provided Enhancement Packages as little or as much as they want, according to SAP.
The suite announcement also includes “Value Scenarios,” or industry-specific software modules SAP is developing to help companies analyze a specific issue, such as the shopping experience in the retail industry, by viewing data across applications, or implement a business process across applications, such as collaborative engineering, in the manufacturing industry. This approach uses dashboard and other technologies incorporated from SAP’s Business Objects acquisition.
A customer that now upgrades to Business Suite 7, for example, won’t have to do a full resource-intensive upgrade to SCM one month and a full upgrade to CRM several months later. Instead, that customer can choose only the enhancements it wants for SCM and CRM from a single enhancement package. The first package is due later this year.
This could now encourage companies still on ERP R/3 to make the upgrade to ERP 6.0, which already uses the enhancement approach and is compatible with Business Suite 7, while R/3 isn’t.
Watch the below video on which SAP Executive Board Member Jim Hagemann Snabe introduces the new SAP Business Suite 7.
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