CRM without compromise: With move to hybrid model, SAP offers customers more deployment options, flexibility for growth without disruption

Orlando, Florida - May 18, 2006 - In a continuing demonstration of its ability to revolutionise and lead the CRM market, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) yesterday unveiled a CRM strategy designed to give customers maximum flexibility in deployment options while continuing to innovate and add important capabilities that help companies meet specific business challenges in key industries.

While announcing its road map to migrate its entire CRM offering to its previously-announced hybrid model by 2007, SAP also unveiled SAP CRM 2006s, the industry's first hybrid on-demand/on-premise CRM suite, which offers new industry-specific capabilities, full Web service-enabling and an easy-to-use interface that is shared across on-demand and on-premise deployment options. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE '06, SAP's international customer conference, being held in Orlando, Florida, from 16 to 18 May.

With SAP CRM 2006s, companies can choose the solution and deployment option that best meets their needs, achieve immediate business results, and grow strategically as business needs evolve without disruption to user adoption or customer relationships. The announcement follows last week's introduction of the second wave of SAP CRM on-demand solutions. SAP has successfully delivered to promise on the first two waves of its hybrid solution road map by bringing to the market the SAP Sales on-demand solution and SAP Marketing on-demand solution. With SAP CRM 2006s, SAP becomes the only vendor whose hybrid solutions are based on a shared architecture, data model and user interface, providing seamless transitions across on-demand and on-premise deployment options.

Planned for availability to first customers this summer, SAP CRM 2006s features the same simplified user experience in both on-premise and off-premise deployments and is fully Web service-enabled for ease of integration with SAP and non-SAP backend systems. For sales professionals, service managers and marketing managers, SAP CRM 2006s features an easy-to-use interface as well as alignment of business processes in key industries to deliver fast results. New capabilities include:

* Industry enhancements include telecommunications order and contract management, financial services leasing and account origination, public sector grants management and social services capabilities, and life sciences contract lifecycle management.

* For business information workers in all industries, SAP CRM 2006s provides new capabilities for high-volume business-to-customer (B2C) environments, advanced call centre capabilities, loyalty management, pipeline performance management, case management, channel marketing funds and high-volume campaign management.

* In addition, SAP CRM 2006s provides a user interface configuration tool that enables non-IT users to quickly and easily adapt business processes and terminology based on their unique business needs.

* For IT organisations, SAP CRM 2006s provides new, seamless deployment options to make IT choices transparent to the business user and ease the transition and interoperation between on-demand and on-premise models. The new Web services definition toolset allows IT professionals to define new Web services on the fly according to customer needs and to connect SAP CRM 2006s easily to external and legacy applications.

* SAP CRM 2006s provides a rich set of productised enterprise services which partners and customers can use in the context of the Enterprise Services Community initiative from SAP.

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Fujitsu came to SAP because it needed to quickly automate the way its sales associates captured account data in order to improve visibility into sales and revenue forecasts. In addition, Fujitsu executives realised the real payoff for CRM would be the ability to arm sales professionals with up-to-date product pricing and availability to help convert each customer interaction into a new sale. With SAP CRM 2006s, Fujitsu has been able to quickly make account data current and visible across its sales organisation. And, over the next year, the company will be able to better ensure its strategic requirements for CRM - real-time access to product pricing and availability - can be seamlessly migrated without disrupting its sales processes, customer relationships or quarterly results.

"We knew that the best long-term solution for our customer-focused needs would be an on-premise, completely integrated solution like mySAP CRM, but we also needed a solution that could get up and running quickly and was easy to use," said Doug Moore, senior vice-president of Sales, Fujitsu Network Communications.

"We were attracted to SAP's CRM offering because it featured an easy user interface and a commonality with our strategic, on-premise solution. This was the perfect answer to helping us address immediate demands while leaving us open to an in-house suite deployment later."

Hybrid software solutions use identical code bases both for off-premise and on-premise deployments and allow customers to easily and quickly outsource or insource specific applications. Hybrid solutions offer customers:

* Immediate business results through on-demand deployments
* Strategic growth by innovating on top of their own on-premise deployment
* No disruption of user adoption or customer relationships during the transition of the software deployment model.

"As user needs evolve to encompass more collaborative tasks or complex business processes, they outgrow the abilities of current on-demand offerings," said Michael Maoz, vice-president, CRM Technologies, Gartner, Inc. "The availability of an on-premise system with an identical user interface and advanced features removes a major hurdle in the adoption of on-demand CRM."

"SAP is innovating its CRM offering with customers' strategic business benefits in mind," said Shai Agassi, president of the Product and Technology Group and member of the executive board, SAP. "By taking our entire CRM offering to the hybrid deployment model by 2007, we give our customers the ability to focus on their success with customers while we in turn see to it that the CRM application is integrated with backend systems and flexibly deployable in exactly the way the company benefits the most from it. For each customer, these deployment requirements change over time, so SAP is now in an even stronger position to partner with our customers throughout the entire lifecycle of their CRM journey."

For more information, visit www.sap.com/crm.