SAP Business ByDesign (A1S)

A1S is released for the market. Finally SAP is joining Software as a service (SaaS) initiative and delivers a solution for Small Businesses and Midsize Companies called SAP Business ByDesign. Formerly the solution was called All-in-One (A1S) business suite. It was the most expected product from SAP over the years. In nutshell it is adaptable on-demand business solution designed to liberate midsize companies from the restrictions of traditional IT. On-demand in this case means that service is hosted by SAP and is provided all necessary technology infrastructure and support services. Offering is based on subscriptions model priced per user/month for the specific capabilities pricing starts at 133€. SAP expects 10,000 customers will sign up for the SAP Business ByDesign service by 2010. So join in congratulation and wish them good luck.

Solution is currently available to early adopter customers in few major markets like US, UK, France, Germany and China.

ORACLE to buy ARIS and what’s an impact on SAP?

There are rumors on the market about possible purchase of ARIS product by ORACLE from IDS Scheer company or event buyout of IDS Scheer as a company by ORACLE.

What would be a purpose? ORACLE is trying to build meta data integration layer that would enable ARIS’s business models interpretation directly to ORACLE application like: E-Business, PeopleSoft, JDE, Siebel, etc. ORACLE is selling ARIS already with its own Fusion product. This is suite of programs of ORACLE’s business process management (BPM) portfolio. Within this suite IDS Scheer’s Process Management Platform is a part of it. Now ORACLE has greater plans. E.g. to build middle tier optimized for process models which would be a part of Fusion Middleware Oracle as SOA vendor would get big portion here. If ORACLE would buy ARIS it would save development effort for such an application. Buy is very often better then to develop it by is self.

At the moment IDS Scheer is very famous partner of SAP now it becomes an important partner of ORACLE. As it was in many cases in past, ORACLE used to buy own self partners. ORACLE is not commenting these rumors of course.

The question is what lost SAP if such a buyout will come. It is not a question of one partner but a huge portion of market I think. So another possibility that SAP would hurry up to make step of IDS Scheer acquisition first.

Color of SAP GUI windows

I’m posting a small hint which helps to recognize in which SAP system you are connected via SAP GUI. Sometimes when you are working with several sessions in different systems and you switching between windows very often it is problem to do not get confused.

To avoid such an mistakes you can change the color of SAP GUI windows for production client screen to red color for test systems to some different color and as well some other color for development systems. Procedure to do so is following:

 

Log in to some SAP system in which you want to change the color via SAP GUI ->; select Customizing local layout (ALT+F12) -> Set color to system (select color) -> Save.

- update 24/06/2011 - 

Kindly notice that within new SAP Signature Design it is not possible to use functionality of GUI color change. This is due to fact that SAP Signature Design is provided with its own new color scheme. Simply it is not permitted to change any colors in this design. You have still option to change your GUI design settings in Window's Control Panel -> SAP GUI Configuration to other layouts (so called themes) like: STREAMLINE or TRADESHOW.

For further reference check following SAP notes:

780864 - Color settings in the SAP GUI for Windows cannot be changed

1233328 - SAP Signature Design for SAP GUI for Windows

- update 03/03/2012 - 
Thanks to Anonymous contributor to discussion of this blog who pointed me to SDN's forum post solving issue of how to set GUI color for GUI 7.20. As per suggestion in this forum post:

http://forums.sdn.sap.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1904282

Change color is only possible for ENJOY theme. Therefore set your GUI to this theme via Control Panel or SAP GUI Options dialog. Then logon to a particular system and via ALT+F12 -> Options -> Visual Design -> Color to System set color to system.

- update 28/11/2013 – 

There are other improvements to setting of colors to GUI within SAP GUI 73. Basically one of GUI themes – Signature Design can have color set as per user.  For details see note: 1669255 - SAP GUI 7.30: SAP Signature Theme Colors or chapter no 6 (Setting SAP Signature Theme Color) in document: SAP GUI Administration. The document is basically about configuring and administering SAP GUI for Windows but it deals with color setting as well.

At the moment you can set up different colors for different SAP systems SIDs within Enjoy and Signature themes. 

Rising of SAP BI

According to a Gartner Dataquest report published recently SAP grew its market share to 8.2 percent, and its sales increased 60 percent over last year. Full report is located here (account to Gartner site is required, it is not for free). You can find official SAP press announcement here.

Despite of these marketing buzzwords it is very good that SAP BI market is rising up especially for us – SAP BI guys :-).

- update 11/22/2008 –

Business Objects (BOBJ) - as an SAP company gained position by Gartner, Inc. in leader’s quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools”. Gartner’s evaluation is based on an evaluation of Business Objects and SAP’s completeness of vision and ability to execute. More information comes here.