SAP Readies a Big Business Marketplace

SAP, one of the world’s largest makers of software for business, is readying an ambitious plan to build a global marketplace for business products and services, according to senior company executives. Photo William McDermott, SAP’s chief executive. William McDermott, SAP’s chief executive.Credit Uwe Anspach/DPA, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images SAP, which is headquartered in Germany but whose chief executive, William R. McDermott, is American, could make money selling the software, Mr. McDermott said. The company might also gain valuable economic information about business behavior that it could then sell. “Participants conducting digital commerce, and the insights that can come from there,” he said. “All through HANA,” SAP’s tool for rapidly managing and analyzing large quantities of information. The plan, still in development, will be announced early next year, he said. If successful, SAP could become a direct competitor to Alibaba, which already enables significant commerce between businesses through an online marketplace. Given SAP’s customer base, however, the business would most likely aim to be far bigger and more sophisticated and to involve larger sums changing hands. If SAP could succeed in analyzing that, it might be able to identify the kind of economic behavior that stocks trade on faster than most government agencies can presently publish. That plan is a long way off, however, and faces numerous hurdles. Several Internet companies have already tried to be alternatives to government reporting, without success. None, however, have SAP’s size, nor have they worked deeply in a world of cloud and mobile computing. SAP follows Oracle as the world’s top maker of software for things like planning and managing global manufacturing and financial operations. It has more than 263,000 customers in 188 countries. For several years SAP tried to move more of its business from older-style computers inside companies to cloud computing, selling the software not as a packaged item but as a service. This has involved several acquisitions, including Ariba, a maker of software for corporate purchases, for $4.3 billion in 2012, and Fieldglass, with software for hiring and managing temporary workers, for more than $1 billion last May. On Thursday, SAP closed a deal to buy Concur, used in filing expenses, for $8.3 billion. HANA was first offered as a cloud-based service in May 2013. The Concur acquisition was particularly important in Mr. McDermott’s plan to build a network of software available online. Concur’s chief executive, Steve Singh, has previously discussed using the expense system as a way of procuring and accounting for things like airline flights, cars and hotels. United Airlines and other travel and lodging providers have deals with Concur to allow booking through the expense system. “There is an amazing opportunity for technology to anticipate our needs and act on them, whether it’s getting goods and services to run business, hiring people or buying trips,” said Mr. Singh, who will be running the planned new business for SAP. By opening the marketplace up to outside developers, even SAP competitors, SAP would be able to increase the number of offerings in its store, and also derive more data. “We want this to be an open and global, digitally connected network,” Mr. Singh said. “Anyone can build software on it.”