Here is what Successfactors had to say about the integration.

The integration of SuccessFactors’ Performance and Talent Management suite with Google Apps collaborative products and other tools enables enterprises of any and all sizes to reap the benefits of Software as a Service and cloud computing (no hardware or software to download, install or maintain), and extends SuccessFactors’ mission to help companies better manage, motivate and engage their people to drive better business results.

• My friend Tom Otter provides an insider’s view.
• Bob Warfield writes a great blogs on all things SaaS, and Web 2.0. His BbD summary is very good.
• Jeff Nolan over at Venture Chronicles is always insightful. Another good summary.
• Joshua Greenbaum is another good read.

and for fun check out these:

• Mr Ellison is holding his nose.
• Salesforce.com vs SAP BbD.

SAP’s official magazine SAP INFO is also interesting reading. SDN may have some interesting information soon. Not too much at the moment. I still have many open questions:

1. How (if at all) will SAP partner regarding BBD? ADP is listed as the only partner.
2. Will SAP release an SDK for BBD?
3. Will BBD be the end of SAP’s All-in-one and Business One?

Update – Sept 26, 2007: Interesting read on Infoworld.

Update – Nov 7, 2007: Kagermann says SAP BBD is not for enterprise customers.

Do you have answers?

Henning Kagermann’s (CEO of SAP AG) recent presentations provide more A1S hints. Here is SAP’s 2007 Q2 analyst presentation and also the May 2007 Sanford Bernstein presentation. On page 26 Kagermann summarizes the salient features of A1S:

• A New Product: Broad cross-industry coverage, enterprise SOA by design, model-based design, configuration via business questions, and self-service & embedded training.
• A New Business Model: Try-Run-Adapt, on demand, embedded services & remote management, order of magnitude lower TCO, and quality/robustness is key.

In this blog post searchSAP talks about SAP’s mid-market push including A1S. Here Venderprisey summarizes some SaaS blog postings including an interesting reference to A1S. The Register and others suggest that SAP picked the Sept date to overlap with the Salesforce Dreamforce conference.

Hasso Plattner’s “new idea” presentation is basically the technical underpinnings of A1S. You can see the keynote here, however you’ll have to register first. SAP calls A1S, Enterprise SOA by Design vs SAP ERP it calls Enterprise SOA by Evolution. Here is a list of the new idea aspects of Plattner’s “New Idea”: in-memory databases, real-time analytics, harmonized UI, cloud computing, on-demand, events & triggers, modular deployment, model-based configuration, no code exposed, new markets, community, standards and finally SOA.

Competitors include: Salesforce.com and its AppExchange marketplace for on demand applications, Oracle on demand, Netsuite.com and Successfactors.com. Workday, co-founded by Mr. Peoplesoft himself, Dave Duffield, is also an interesting play. They market Workday as: On-Demand Enterprise Business Services.

Also see my post regarding integration between SaaS solutions and SAP.

I’m sure we’ll know more after September 19.

I think that utility computing is finally here. This is what IBM’s been talking about for a while, on demand computing.

Google offers another set of interesting web services. It includes APIs for interacting with Google Apps and Google Gears that enables web applications to work offline. Adobe offers something similar called, AIR (formerly Apollo). Offline web applications will bring the power of Web 2.0 applications to the offline desktop (Did I just say that? Web apps more powerful than desktop apps?)

Intuitively I know that this is a huge disruptive change — if only I can figure out how to take advantage of it! Let me know if you’ve figured it out…

Update Sept 6, 2007:  Check out SynthaSite’s use of Amazon’s Computing Cloud. Nirvanix recently launched as an alternative to Amazon’s S3. Nirvanix provides an SLA — Amazon doesn’t.