SAP

Long-time partners SAP and Accenture are deepening their relationship with a new offering that calls for Accenture to serve as a single point of contact on projects involving SAP's HANA in-memory database platform and Accenture's own intellectual property.

A survey of nearly 1,200 SAP professionals in the U.S. has produced some interesting details about what they are paid, where they work, how many use visas, and what their job expectations are.

Global CRM (customer relationship management) revenue grew 12.5 percent last year to US$18 billion, a rate three times that of all enterprise software segments on average, as companies look to acquire more business and serve existing customers better, according to a new Gartner report.

SAP is planning to impose a higher price on its Standard Support software maintenance offering later this year, with the increase applying only to new contracts.

As 2012 comes to a close, the ERP software market's biggest players, Oracle and SAP, are seeing their long rivalry become a stalemate, while they face a common set of enemies in the form of upstart ERP vendors based in the cloud, such as NetSuite and Workday.

SAP announced strong support for the Windows 8 platform this week, including six upcoming mobile apps that focus on business training, recruiting and sales

SAP has laid out a set of pricing and policies for tying together its array of cloud-based and on-premises applications, providing some options at no charge, but others that will cost customers additional money.

SAP has made its HANA in-memory database available on Amazon Web Services at an hourly rate, giving customers and partners a new way to try out the platform quickly without investing in hardware and perpetual software licenses, the company announced Tuesday at the Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas.

SAP on Monday is set to unveil a line of cloud-based EPM (enterprise performance management) applications that run on top of its HANA in-memory database platform.

During the upcoming retrial of Oracle's corporate-theft lawsuit against SAP, the companies plan to call a star-studded array of tech executives as witnesses including CEO Larry Ellison, former Oracle co-president and current Infor CEO Charles Phillips and SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, according to court documents filed Thursday.