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HP taps SAP Web portal

The computing company plans to use mySAP.com internally on a worldwide basis, to develop a backbone that links its employees, customers and business partners.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
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Hewlett-Packard announced today a plan to use SAP's Web portal to help the computing company ship products faster and cut operational costs.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP, a longtime SAP business partner, said it plans to use mySAP.com internally to develop a backbone that links its employees, customers and business partners.

MySAP.com is business software maker SAP's Internet strategy, incorporating a work portal employees can use as a hub for accessing Internet content, SAP's core R/3 business management software applications and other internal business applications--as well as a Net marketplace where businesses can procure goods and services from their partners and suppliers.

"MySAP.com allows any user within HP to access all applications with the click of the mouse," said Mayur Shah, a senior vice president in SAP's high tech industry sector. "It will become the main desktop application (for HP employees)."

Also today, HP is expected to announce its intention to integrate its electronic deal-making software, called "e-speak," with the mySAP.com marketplace.

HP uses SAP software to manage "back office" business functions including accounting, manufacturing, and logistics, most recently installing SAP's Internet product configurator.

Nick Earle, HP's chief marketing officer, said the company, which has between 5,000 and 10,000 R/3 users, will save money by using mySAP.com as a standard platform for collaboration and locating services on the Internet.

Through e-speak technology, HP also plans to add electronic brokering capabilities to the mySAP.com marketplace, which employees can use to find the right services online to suit their needs.

For example, if e-speak is used by British Airlines, a mySAP.com user could search for a specific passenger on a particular British Airlines flight and quickly gather that information, Earle said. The company can also use the system to track invoices and bill payment online--for a box of 500 pencils, for one example--using mySAP.com.

Today's announcement is by far the first HP has made with SAP. Earlier this year, HP and SAP announced an initiative with Qwest, through which Qwest will host SAP R/3 applications on HP's platform. Over the past decade, there have been 5,500 SAP R/3 installations on HP systems. More than 100 companies have hired HP to outsource their SAP R/3 operations.