For SAP, software as a service (SaaS) is no longer a side story. It is SAP's stated intention to become a leader in this business by 2015. Yesterday, Lars Dalgaard, head of SAP's 5000-strong Cloud business, announced his route to make it big in this market.

Basically, SAP sees the most promising domains for SaaS offerings as falling into four solution areas: "People, Money, Customers and Suppliers," - i.e. Human Capital Management, Financials, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Procurement - and it will offer a Cloud solution in each. It will no longer major on the 'integrated suite' story, though these four will of course interoperate - with each other, with its on-premises solutions, and also with the wider world through integration partner technologies such as Boomi, Cast Iron, and Mulesoft.

Linked to this, SAP is also aiming to become a major PaaS (platform as a service) supplier with Netweaver Cloud which will include its in-memory database and mobile applications technologies...

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