SAP and Recognition Systems have agreed to jointly develop integration between SAP's enterprise resource planning and data warehouse packages and Recognition's Protagon suite, which offers customer-segmentation tools to help marketing professionals plan and analyze marketing campaigns. The integrated offering will be available in the second quarter of next year.
Analysts says the partnership will help SAP get to market on time in the CRM arena. If SAP had built marketing software from the ground up, as it is doing for the sales and customer support components of its CRM suite, it would have taken at least another year, says Steve Bonadio, an analyst at Meta Group.
"I think SAP felt a lot of pressure from the marketplace not only to deploy a solution but articulate a strategy," says Bonadio. "This partnership is in part to fill some holes where SAP didn't have a direction. They desperately needed to have a story."
