Anywhere: SAP's lighter cloud-solution for SMEs in the US
Enterprise application software company SAP has announced the general availability of SAP Anywhere solution in the United States. SAP Anywhere is a new front-office cloud solution is specifically designed to help meet the e-commerce and customer interaction needs of small businesses with 10 to 200 employees. Acceding to SAP Anywhere, small and medium sized enterprises can capitalize on retail store sales, build a Web site or online store, create marketing campaigns, sell products and take payments, manage inventory and analyze business performance from a mobile phone or tablet.
The company has partnered with Google and PayPal offering small business leaders everything they need in a single package that directly integrates with partners’ platforms. The offering gives partners one solution that can be used to access complementary services. Partners also have the opportunity to integrate, refer, resell and implement SAP Anywhere. The company will also bee integrating global shipping and logistics services provided by United Parcel Service.
EJ Jackson, President and General Manager, SAP Anywhere, SAP, says, “Digital marketing and e-commerce is a strategic necessity for SMEs. More than 28 million small firms in the United States need to market goods online and satisfy customers’ desire for a digital buying experience, and at the end of the day, company size is irrelevant to the consumer. To achieve this we forged a completely new solution in which all relevant functionality has been united in the cloud and mobilized under SAP Anywhere.”
The SAP Anywhere solution meets the payment card industry’s standard for secure transactions and secure sockets layer (SSL) protection. With real-time information from their back-office software, users obtain active decision support based on data from both internal and external sources. It includes a unified order management system that makes use of actual inventory data.
A recent study ‘Thriving in the Digital Economy‘, conducted by research firm IDC stated that small businesses struggle the most with the business tools that range from making payments to marketing to customer analytics and e-commerce. These tools are essential to operate a live business with today’s digitally native consumers. Companies that get this right grow faster.
Ray Boggs, Vice President, Small and Medium Business Research, IDC, says, “Smaller firms face special challenges when it comes to coordinating their e-commerce and customer interaction resources. Many have older processes that weren’t designed for today’s mobile online world. SAP Anywhere can provide the connective tissue to link front-office and back-office activities to improve internal efficiency and customer satisfaction.”