SAP used its annual US Sapphire user event to announce a raft of initiatives to support its strategies for information access, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and on-demand applications.

SAP announced global availability of MySAP 2005 with upgrades for information access and role-based work centres. It also demonstrated an early version of its Project Muse user interface, to offer an easier way to access SAP applications from the desktop.

Derek Prior of AMR Research said Muse could have a big impact. “The current SAP GUI is aimed at power users: it’s a bit clumsy and very detailed,” he argued. “You’ve got so many user interfaces now with the SAP portal, and now with Muse and Mendocino [the Microsoft/SAP tie-up recently renamed Duet]. It could be a problem for IT support.”

SAP also reaffirmed its commitment to SOAs. SAP chief Henning Kagermann said, “Last year we said SOAs were the next big thing and [now there are] 31,000 installations of NetWeaver.”

SAP announced a $125m fund for vendors building apps on the NetWeaver platform; and plans to release hundreds of “productised enterprise services” – web services pre-defined with business processes – next month.

“While web services and SOAs are helping customers move in the right direction, the real innovation is happening with the business-level building blocks,” said SAP’s Shai Agassi.

In support of the announcement, SAP launched an enterprise services workplace, which offers partners, customers and systems integrators a hosted environment where they can collaborate on SOA development.

Prior said, “SAP is going for SOA in a big way, so it has to open up its development architecture. This lets industry-specific communities work together to define the SOA components that will make the most sense for them.”

But Prior advised that firms will need enterprise architects “who understand how services are used across the IT department, rather than the current silo model of an SAP team, a Microsoft camp, WebSphere experts and so on”.

Elsewhere, SAP unveiled a hybrid hosted/installed CRM suite called CRM 2006s, which it said lets firms switch easily between the two options. It is due for release this summer.