San Jose, CA August 8, 2001 SAP Portals Inc., a provider of open-enterprise portal and business intelligence products and a wholly owned subsidiary of SAP AG, today announced the implementation of SAP Portals' Enterprise Unification Portal as the foundation of Getronics' new U.S. corporate portal. The portal is designed to increase internal communication and employee self-service. Getronics is an IT solutions and services company that works with professional users of information technology.
Getronics US plans to deploy its corporate portal to all 4,000 of its U.S. employees by September 2001. Currently, 600 U.S. employees use the corporate portal to increase productivity and access to mission-critical information, thereby helping them do their jobs more effectively. The Getronics US portal provides its employees with access to time and expense management and human resource applications, the company intranet and the Internet, as well as a marketing portal.
Getronics US will implement SAP Portals' Enterprise Unification Portal to provide its employees, many of whom work off-site at client locations, with information about all facets of Getronics' U.S. operations, while also providing real-time access to critical information and systems.
With the help of Clarkston, an information technology consulting firm, Getronics US evaluated several portal suppliers and chose to implement SAP Portals' Enterprise Unification Portal based on a broad range of criteria, including cross-product integration and low implementation cost. This served as a benchmark in support of Getronics' selection. SAP Portals' Enterprise Unification Portal also offers integration and connectivity to Microsoft servers and applications within the portal.
The SAP Portals portfolio includes enterprise portals, business intelligence applications, unique content offerings and professional services. Enterprise portal offerings are composed of SAP Portals' the Enterprise Information Portal, SAP Portals' Enterprise Collaboration Portal and SAP Portals' Enterprise Unification Portal. These products offer open portal solutions that integrate with enterprise applications and a dynamic user interface.
Bringing people, ideas and information together across disparate systems and locales is among the key challenges facing any business today, said SAP Portals CEO Shai Agassi. Getronics US looked to portal technology to solve the challenge of connecting thousands of employees, and we're proud that SAP Portals' Enterprise Unification Portal is the only portal solution they found to be robust enough for that challenge.
We needed a technology that enabled us to bring our back-office ERP [enterprise resource planning] information onto the manager's e-business desktop, said Glen Slater, vice president of e-Business for Getronics US. After a comprehensive evaluation of a number of portal solutions currently available on the market, SAP Portals was the only supplier that offered a solution with a unified platform and the scalability and adaptability to grow with our company. SAP Portals is now helping us support the increasing demand from our employees, clients and partners for real-time access to mission-critical information stored in our enterprise applications and systems.
