Hasso Plattner Speaks about SAP's A1S Software

To continue a theme from my recent posting, I found some more details about SAP's A1S product from a recent article in Sand Hill. You've probably seen the SAP TV commercial commercials-- the yellow ones with customers who are pleasantly surprised to learn about SAP's offerings in the small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) customers. SAP's A1S product, which has been under development for the past 3 years, aims to deliver solutions for the SMB space.

Some additional insight into their product:

• 3,000 SAP employees are working on A1S.
• A1S is a split from their previous source base and delivers a new user interface. (I've worked with the current SAP client, which is a locally installed, fat client.) The new user interface (UI) is web-based and makes extensive use of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA).
  
• In a departure from their rigid past, the new UI can be customized to the different industry verticals.
  
• A1S will emphasize a hosted deployment model. In fact, Hasso references successes from Google and Salesforce.com with a hosted deployment model. Customers wary of a hosted model will still be able to install the software on their on-site servers.