| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : JANUARY 10, 2000 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| INDUSTRY OUTLOOK 2000 -- INFORMATION
Trying to Keep SAP's Party Going Software stars can lose their luster overnight. After years of astronomical growth, fortunes turned in 1999 for several big suppliers of enterprise programs that help companies manage manufacturing, accounting, and human resources. The year 2000 will be better for some players. But few of these companies, if any, will ever see the 40%-plus growth rates that were common in 1997-98. For SAP (SAP) in particular, the party turned quiet in 1999. Analysts last year were expecting a 22% increase in revenues. What they got was closer to 13%, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. Part of the problem was widespread preoccupation with Y2K, which caused many of SAP's potential customers to freeze installations of new technology, including enterprise software. ''Nobody expected the Y2K scare would cause so many companies to hold off purchases for this long,'' says Jim Shepherd, senior vice-president at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. Now, to thrive in a post-Y2K era, enterprise software companies must retread themselves for the Internet. Once again, among traditional enterprise vendors, SAP co-CEO Hasso Plattner is leading the charge. But this time, SAP will have to share more of the winnings. The giant, with an estimated $5.3 billion in global sales last year, has launched an initiative called mySAP.com, which essentially grafts onto the Web the same huge SAP programs that customers use internally. This, in theory, allows groups of companies to collaborate more cheaply and easily. Market researcher Gartner Group, for one, thinks mySAP may be too little, too late. Instead of waiting for SAP, Gartner says companies should get needed Web programs right away from specialized e-commerce suppliers such as BroadVision Inc. (BVSN) Morgan Stanley is less pessimistic about the Old Guard. It says SAP's 2000 revenues should rise a respectable 21%--higher than rivals such as Oracle Corp. (ORCL) and J.D. Edwards & Co. (JDEC) Adds AMR's Shepherd: ''Folks in the application software business will be able to sell damn near anything as long as they put an 'e' in front of it.'' By Marcia Stepanek in New York _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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