CeBIT: SAP unveils Sales OnDemand social CRM tool

HANOVER: SAP has previewed Sales OnDemand, the newest on-demand addition to its existing cloud business suite, designed to offer innovative CRM functionality which could help boost user productivity.

The Sales OnDemand software is part of a range of applications that SAP and its partners have been showing off at CeBIT that will extend the capabilities of its on-premise offerings.

Sales OnDemand will be marketed to SAP customers already using the Business ByDesign base platform, and to attract new customers such as subsidiaries of large corporations.

The product was hailed by Peter Lorenz, executive vice president of OnDemand and SME at SAP, as "Facebook and Twitter for the enterprise sales force".

The platform, which was shown to V3.co.uk this morning, is designed to bring the benefits and principals of social networking to corporate communications, internally and between companies that do business with each other.

One area of the interface, named 'Feed', is much like Twitter in appearance, and allows sales staff to message each other and carry out tasks like purchase requests.

Managers can view detailed reports of their sales team, and can access accounts and carry out real-time analysis of data.

An iPad version of the platform, which was briefly demonstrated earlier today, is also in development, and SAP suggested that sales staff might each have an iPad to carry out their daily duties.

The key for future development and uptake for this technology is to go mobile, according to SAP, with the goal of providing support for iPhone, BlackBerry and Android systems.