SAP Unleashes Business Potential Of Real-Time CRM Analytics With Intelligent Software Agents And High-Speed Search Engine

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced extensions to its customer relationship management software that increase the speed and expand the reach of analytics applications for users across the enterprise. Utilizing advances in SAP NetWeaver technology, mySAP CRM now provides users with automated software agents to apply real-time customer insight to everyday business processes in marketing, sales, service, channel management and interaction centers.

The SAP CRM solution leverages a new high-speed search engine in SAP NetWeaver to transform customer segmentation from a day-long processing task to a matter of seconds. Companies can now gain faster and deeper insight into valuable enterprise-wide customer data to take quick action on fleeting business opportunities, increase campaign response rates and gain higher return on marketing investments.

Complementing these new analytics features, the number of "out-of-the-box" user-based roles available in mySAP CRM will be increased to more than 20. These roles address the unique demands of users in various job functions across diverse industries, delivering portal access to all applications and real-time analytics functions necessary to drive effective customer-facing business processes.

Bringing Real-Time Analytics to the Front Lines
With SAP's CRM enhancements, the ability to develop advanced analytical methods reserved until now for specialized consultants and developers are made accessible to a broader base of CRM software users to improve their everyday customer interactions. Through an easy-to-use analysis process designer workbench, users can custom design software agents that run unattended in the background, analyzing data from multiple sources and automatically feeding the results back into operational processes. For example, using an intuitive interface, a user can easily create a software agent that identifies the most profitable customers for a particular product area and updates the customer master file accordingly. Users can access this information quickly in order to make the best decisions for improved customer interactions.

Accelerating Advanced Analyses for Immediate Actions
Whereas customer segmentation analyses traditionally involve batch processing running overnight, campaign managers can now run thorough analyses within seconds-taking into account millions of address records and performing numerous requests in parallel. The new search engine utilizes in-memory database technology in SAP NetWeaver for high-speed processing and retrieval of customer-related data, achieving especially fast results using blade servers. The new search engine takes advantage of SAP NetWeaver integration capabilities to expand the reach of searches across multiple databases.

The powerful search engine brings a new level of performance to the campaign automation process, enabling companies to model target groups in real time and take faster action on market insight. For instance, database marketing managers can more quickly identify customer segments that display similar behavior patterns and immediately target campaigns to directly address, and benefit from, customer needs. Also, interaction center agents now can perform even complex searches across millions of accounts, enabling immediate response times to inquiries during the customer interaction.

"Today's companies need business agility to respond quickly to their customers' demands and, even more importantly, to proactively seize new opportunities before they pass," said Peter Kirschbauer, member of the extended management board, SAP. "SAP is leading this business process evolution with technology advances such as real-time analytics-a CRM solution that improves user productivity and turns static data into actionable business insight to drive bottom-line results."

The real-time analytics extensions for mySAP CRM will be available to customers in June 2004 and the high-speed search engine will be available in September 2004.

About mySAP Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM)
Moving beyond traditional CRM functionality, SAP's innovation and unmatched industry expertise are setting new standards for the way companies connect with their customers and partners, creating customer-centric business processes across enterprisewide operations and business applications.

mySAP Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM) delivers the market's greatest breadth and depth of functionality, offering more than 280 end-to-end, industry-specific processes to cover the unique business demands of more than twenty-five industries. Built on the open, Web services-based architecture of the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, mySAP CRM helps companies leverage existing IT investments, achieve lower total cost of ownership, gain faster return on investment and continually evolve the business processes having the greatest impact on success. (Additional information at www.sap.com/crm).

About SAP
SAP is the world's leading provider of business software solutions. SAP solutions are designed to meet the demands of companies of all sizes-from small and midsize businesses to global enterprises. Powered by the SAP NetWeaver open integration and application platform to reduce complexity and total cost of ownership and empower business change and innovation, mySAP Business Suite solutions are helping enterprises around the world improve customer relationships, enhance partner collaboration and create efficiencies across their supply chains and business operations. The unique core processes of various industries, from aerospace to utilities, are supported by more than 25 industry-specific SAP solution portfolios.

Today, more than 21,600 customers in over 120 countries run more than 69,700 installations of SAP software. With subsidiaries in more than 50 countries, the company is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE under the symbol "SAP." (Additional information at www.sap.com).