Paul Hamerman of Forrester Research recently wrote a report on the current market overview of Business Performance Solutions (BPS) and specifically SAP´s strategic movements. I think you may know that SAP traditionally has had a tendency toward inhouse development of the applications but due to the rapid changes in the market and weakness of SAP in some areas, the company has changed its approach in the past three years and has become more Oracle-Like.



In the Business Performance area, the company made a number of acquisitions last year but at the end, it narrowly missed the Leader classification in business performance solutions (BPS) as it still works to integrate a strong set of acquired capabilities with its business intelligence (BI) middleware and market-leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) transactional applications.

After acquiring Pilot Software for strategy management in February 2007, SAP made another decisive acquisition; its May 2007 acquisition of OutlookSoft was likely influenced by Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion a month earlier. With these acquisitions and a reseller relationship with Acorn Systems, SAP offers a first-rate set of BPS capabilities.

But the future looks bright for SAP: Within the next 12 to 18 months as integration and harmonization road map plans are executed, SAP's BPS product set should come together as the leading choice for its immense ERP customer base.