Walldorf, Germany, and Santa Clara, CA April 5, 2001 SAP AG and Yahoo! Inc. have announced their intention to form a partnership to extend both companies' role in the enterprise portal market. Under the agreement, the companies will work together to develop a joint enterprise portal and market it directly to their customers through their respective sales channels. SAP Portals, the newly created SAP subsidiary devoted to creating enterprise portals and information solutions, will work with both SAP and Yahoo! to provide both an enterprise portal platform and open access to applications, services and personalized external content.
The companies hope to leverage both Yahoo!'s position as the No. 1 most-visited Web site in the workplace and SAP's presence in the e-business solutions market. The enterprise portal is designed to provide scalable and customized content and solutions on a global basis, as well as providing users with a single point of access to information, applications and services from both SAP and Yahoo! Third-party components will also be made available, including e-business applications and services, online exchanges, enterprise content and global Internet content available in 12 languages from Yahoo!'s 2,000 content and service providers.
"This agreement will further solidify Yahoo!'s position as a major player in the enterprise portal market, and advances the Yahoo! platform that has been adopted by major companies, including McDonald's, Honeywell and Seagate Technology," said Tim Koogle, chairman and chief executive officer of Yahoo! Inc.
"The combination of SAP and Yahoo! will provide the best solution for all companies in terms of content, scalability and application integration," said Hasso Plattner, co-chairman of the executive board, CEO and co-founder of SAP AG. "Ours will be the best available enterprise portal that combines robust content and functionality with an intuitive user interface. We expect the joint product will be the enterprise portal of choice for business."
The enterprise portal will use role-based personalization so users can view information that is important and relevant to them. The content will be determined by their roles within their organization, with services and applications based on their tasks and responsibilities. In addition, users will be able to customize content to meet their unique needs and preferences. For example, an individual may have everything from human resources information or sales tracking applications to financial news, industry marketplaces, personal stock portfolios and collaboration tools all in one place. SAP will supply key e-business applications and services, SAP Portals will provide role-based business information, analytics, enterprise portal services and third-party unification, and Yahoo! will provide a global Internet platform and access to content and personalization services.
Users will have access to their personalized information via both standard Web browsers and mobile devices. All communities within an organization will be able to securely access their working environment from airport Internet kiosks, the home office, the hotel room laptop or the corporate office network. The joint enterprise portal offering will be available in the second quarter of 2001.
