New Initiative from SAP Offers Broad Ecommerce Capabilities

SAP, the Walldorf, Germany-based enterprise software giant, has begun moving forward with its broad new ecommerce initiative, called mySAP, which it first announced at its Sapphire users' conference in September in Philadelphia.

The initiative is meant to offer a suite of interconnected and far-reaching ecommerce capabilities beginning with an Internet portal, www.mySAP.com, through which companies, including retailers, can access business applications from SAP and third-party providers.

The mySAP.com site has four main components: Workplace, Marketplace, Business Scenarios and Application Hosting. Workplace offers one-click access to intranet, extranets and front-office, back-office and legacy applications. Marketplace functions as an electronic business-to-business hub providing content, community, collaboration and commerce.

Business Scenarios provides ebusiness solutions that can function within a company or across companies, including purchasing, collaborative planning and knowledge management. In Application Hosting, SAP offers to host companies' business solutions along with financial and human resources applications, then build and host their online business community and marketplace.

In the retail industry, a company that has become an early adopter of the mySAP initiative is GoodHome.com, San Rafael, Calif., a recently launched home furnishings pure-play eretailer. GoodHome, which went live in September, offers shoppers the ability to create online visualizations of item and color mixes as they search selections.

GoodHome was able to go live with the integrated SAP solution in six weeks, says GoodHome CEO Doug Mack. He adds, "Implementing the SAP solution and joining the mySAP.com Marketplace at this stage of our life cycle has allowed us to streamline the entire fulfillment process, and has provided us with a platform that will scale as we grow."—Kimball Livingston RT