MADRID, Nov. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Since launching its cloud strategy at SAPPHIRE® NOW from Orlando in May 2012, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) has infused the cloud DNA of SuccessFactors, an SAP company, into its cloud business to create the most comprehensive portfolio of cloud solutions in the industry. SAP offers 20 solutions and suites in the cloud, designed to optimize a company's most critical assets — people, finances, customers and suppliers. As an integral part of SAP's cloud strategy — together with platform, social and the business network — today, SAP cloud solutions are generating an annual US$1billion revenue run rate, have a 14-fold billings growth rate and boast 20 million users across more than 6,000 customers in the cloud. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd, being held as a co-located event in Madrid from November 13-16.

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"We are passionate about delivering beautiful, robust and reliable cloud applications that work the way our customers do," said Lars Dalgaard, member of the SAP Executive Board. "I announced our cloud strategy acceleration six months ago and since then the response and traction we've seen in the market has been monumental. SuccessFactors grew by 92 percent year over year, SAP Business ByDesign subscription billings at 300 percent year over year, companies are embracing SAP Jam as a productivity tool with more than 8 million users. And we're just getting started. There is so much more to come as we continue to innovate across our cloud portfolio, applying user and mobile-first design principles, to meet our customers' business needs — and most importantly delight our customers' end users."

Line-of-business applications running on SAP Cloud together with the suite solutions — SAP Business ByDesign® and SAP® Business One OnDemand — are empowering people through a consumer-grade user experience, purposeful collaboration and insightful analytics for managers across all areas of the business. Today, SAP announced examples of the significant sales and development momentum across the entire suite of cloud solutions.

Employee Central: The Only Core HR Solution in the Cloud "Glocalized" for Today's Businesses

Leveraging the extensive in-country experts of SAP, SuccessFactors is going beyond high-level globalization to deliver an unprecedented "glocalized" core human resources (HR) cloud solution that makes it easy to do business globally. SuccessFactors Employee Central is the foundation of the Business Execution (BizX) suite. It is the only cloud core HR solution today glocalized in 10 countries — Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, UK and U.S. The glocalized approach is planned to expand to more than 50 countries. With Employee Central, customers can access and manage one global system of record, fine-tuned to meet local needs, better accelerating global business results.

Sonova Group, a leading provider of hearing healthcare solutions, is growing rapidly with a global presence in 90 countries. The company has quadrupled its size in the last four years and needed a single integrated global platform to support innovation, synergy and growth.

"We were impressed with the performance of SuccessFactors as well as its ease of use," said Carine Brändle, systems and process specialist, corporate HRM, Sonova Group. "The look and feel is very intuitive, which is important from a usability and adoption perspective. With SuccessFactors, we're able to manage our full workforce, across more than 90 countries with Employee Central and the BizX suite. Rather than spending months pulling together disparate Excel spreadsheets, we can now gather critical data in a matter of minutes. We also have greater visibility into core aspects of our existing workforce, a good audit trail on our recruitment of new hires and have the strategic insight required to carefully plan and scale for growth." 

Launch of New SAP® Financials OnDemand Solution Providing Collaborative Real-Time Financials for the Entire Business

Now generally available, SAP® Financials OnDemand is a real-time, insight-driven financial management solution designed for the cloud. With an intuitive, easy-to-consume interface and personalized information, it features embedded, dynamic analytics, enabling companies to achieve superior financial insight across the business. Customers can use the solution to drive streamlined, end-to-end compliant financial processes as well as real-time financial performance information for everyone in the business. Powered by the SAP HANA® platform, SAP Financials OnDemand drastically increases the flexibility in which enterprises manage their data while providing the heavy lifting needed to power financial insights for the mobile workforce.

"While cloud-based financial applications have gained traction among SMB buyers for several years now, Saugatuck believes that the conditions are finally ripe for adoption of core financial applications among upper-mid and large enterprises, said Bill McNee, founder and CEO, Saugatuck Technology. "SAP's new large-enterprise targeted SAP Financials OnDemand leverages its long heritage and leadership in the space, with a modern set of capabilities that aim to help support the broader roles and responsibilities that CFOs now have."

SAP® Customer OnDemand Now More Powerful With SAP® Jam

SAP® Customer OnDemand is a people-centric, cloud-based solution for sales, service and marketing organizations. It now has new, deal-specific collaboration rooms that leverage the SAP® Jam social software platform to enable sales teams and internal experts to socially connect and communicate with customers in the context of each opportunity. Customers can also easily provide feedback and share what is important to them to strengthen the relationship. Learn more about customers' experience with the solution via testimonial videos at http://sales.ondemand.com/customermontage.

Newell-Rubbermaid, a global marketer of consumer and commercial products with a strong portfolio of leading brands and sales in more than 100 countries, was looking for a better way to communicate the latest market trends, product updates and order status with its customer-facing teams to provide top-notch sales and customer service through both traditional and social media channels. Native connectivity to back-office systems such as the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application SAP® ERP was also critical in providing real-time back-office information and deep customer insight, something the company was not able to achieve with other cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) vendors.

"With SAP Customer OnDemand, our customer-facing teams are more in touch with our customers' needs and better able to work in concert to exceed their expectations," said Sinde McClung, director, CRM applications, Newell Rubbermaid. "Our sales teams stay up-to-date in real time on information such as customer and material master changes, POS, invoice sales and open order information thru reporting mashups. Our organization is now leveraging mobile devices to improve both the speed and quality of customer and employee interactions. We are already seeing great benefits of coordinated account activity and collaboration through one modern, cloud-based CRM solution that's easy-to-use and enables us to harness the wealth of customer insight across our enterprise."

SAP Redefines Enterprise Social With SAP Jam and SAP® Social OnDemand

SAP introduced two new social offerings in October 2012: SAP Jam and the SAP® Social OnDemand solution. SAP Jam makes collaboration easy. It embeds within an organization's CRM, human capital management (HCM), finance and other applications, integrating social with way people work and increasing the rate of adoption. SAP Social OnDemand transforms social media conversations into rich business insights. The solution helps marketing and customer service organizations better engage with customers to increase brand loyalty, manage reputational risks and capitalize on opportunities.

Parmalat is a multinational Italian dairy and food corporation listed on the Milan stock exchange and controlled by the French Group Lactalis, with 14,000 employees across 16 countries. The company identified a practical need to lighten activities and procedures to increase productivity, lower cost and improve satisfaction. It took a strategic approach to leverage SAP Jam, integrated with the SuccessFactors BizX suite, to provide collaboration within immediate teams, across broader groups and in between corporate divisions.

"As a non-technology company with a diverse workforce — both in terms of geography and job type — we knew we needed to implement a collaboration tool that tied into other company systems and made work easier, focusing on how SAP Jam could solve business needs," said Riccardo Sebastiano Piaggi, group head, Organization & Development, Parmalat. "To get started, we established well-identified guidelines and encouraged early adopters in SAP Jam groups that could address business needs and cross-office collaboration. We launched groups for well-identified areas aiming to cover well-identified needs. With the involvement of the early adopters, our goal is to allow the collaboration grow in a bottom-up approach. By sharing experiences, expertise and tips, we believe we'll be able to create success stories to form the basis for helping make collaboration appealing to the rest of our people — and, step by step, it has been working."

SAP Business ByDesign Gains Significant Traction With Larger Companies and Subsidiaries

SAP Business ByDesign has seen significant market growth over the past six months. SAP has introduced more than 800 new capabilities in the integrated business management solution designed for midsize companies or subsidiaries of large enterprise customers, and has added multiple thousands of users around the globe.

Hilti is a global leader of value-added, top-quality products for professional customers in the construction and building maintenance industries. The company selected SAP Business ByDesign as its next-generation enterprise platform for subsidiaries across more than 30 countries. Like many global companies, Hilti had a business need to standardize on one platform for all international employees covering different processes, such as project management, sales and financials.

"Implementing SAP Business ByDesign has allowed us to deliver on Hilti's strategy of business modularity by implementing a solid core with SAP ERP at corporate and a flexible boundary, anchored by SAP Business ByDesign, at our subsidiaries," said Dr. Martin Petry, group CIO, Hilti. "This has led to improved customer satisfaction and profitability at our subsidiaries, better leverage of operational infrastructure across our lead business organizations, and increased cross-organization process efficiency throughout."

Open Integration Strategy as Key to Customer Success in the Cloud

SAP is solving the traditional integration challenge by providing a seamless approach to integrating cloud solutions that ultimately lowers cost, increases speed and enhances simplicity for customers. The approach is comprised of comprehensive standards-based APIs, pre-packaged integrations and robust integration tools — both on premise and cloud-based. SAP provides prepackaged integration of SAP cloud solutions with on-premise SAP applications, as well as with third-party cloud solutions from key innovation partners. Customers can use the packaged integration scenarios as-is or create their own integrations.

SAP is also offering the new SAP HANA® Cloud Integration technology, along with pre-packaged integration content with SAP Customer OnDemand. Moving forward, SAP intends to offer SAP HANA Cloud Integration along with pre-packaged integration content with many of its other cloud solutions. SAP HANA Cloud Integration is planned to be the standard integration service of the SAP HANA® Cloud platform.

Driving consumer choice, in addition to SAP integration technology, the company is also offering an open certification program to third-party integration platforms, such as Boomi, CastIron and Mulesoft, to integrate SAP cloud solutions, using SAP standards-based APIs, to third-party on-premise and cloud solutions.

To learn more, see previous announcements, "SAP Accelerates Innovation in the World's Largest Business Network" and "SAP Introduces SAP HANA Cloud, One of the Industry's First In-Memory Cloud Platforms," and watch a video: "Get in the Cloud with SAP." For announcements, blog posts, videos and other coverage during SAPPHIRE NOW + SAP TechEd Madrid, visit the Events Newsroom.

SAPPHIRE® NOW + SAP® TechEd Madrid

In 2012, SAP again brings together its largest ecosystem education event series with its premier customer conference for a co-located event being held in Madrid, Spain, from November 13-16. With SAPPHIRE® NOW, SAP offers its customers, partners, and prospects even more opportunities to engage in dialogue with peers, participants and thought leaders around the globe, and can gain insight as to how SAP is delivering on its product strategy and helping organizations around the world to run better. SAP® TechEd brings IT managers, software developers, administrators, and business process experts together to learn in an interactive environment directly from the experts responsible for cutting-edge SAP technology. The co-located event provides access to the entire SAP ecosystem and enables attendees to learn how SAP can help their organizations run like never before. Follow on Twitter at @SAPPHIRENOW and @SAPTechEd, and join the conversation at #SAPPHIRENOW and #SAPTechEd.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 197,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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