ReadWriteWeb

Samsung is taking aggressive steps to reach deep into the enterprise with plans for a suite of mobile collaboration applications and partnerships with the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle and a host of others.

The collaborative tools including enterprise email, instant messaging security, mobile device management, unified communications, customer relationship management, salesforce automation and business intelligence.

Samsung is working with its channel partners to provide the applications. It's another form of bundling, really, providing options for what products an enterprise customer may want to include on devices for its employees.

Recently, SAP showed us its new, cloud-based enterprise collaboration service called 12Sprints. It embraces consumer services and activity streams correlating to the context of the business use, in particular collaboration among teams and groups.

Since that demo a few weeks ago, our views about the SAP service have changed a bit. In particular now that Google Buzz is part of the picture and conversations we have had recently with companies like Jive Software.

It's evident that the landscape is changing. 12Sprints, Jive Software and a host of other enterprise services have solidified the belief that the enterprise expects applications to be social. Enterprise vendors are hearing that pretty clearly from their customers.

The rise of cloud computing looks like it has lead to the fall of SAP CEO Léo Apotheker, who resigned over the weekend.

It's not that cloud computing has been absent at SAP. There are a number of efforts underway. But it's the lack of any unified strategy that is most notable.

"They have been exploring the cloud," said Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group. "It's how quickly they have responded is the question of contention."

SAP's CEO Léo Apotheker resigned today. SAP will return to a co-CEO structure, replaced by Bill McDermott, head of field organization, and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development.

The particulars are to be announced early tomorrow.

According to the Financial Times, one reason for the resignation is SAP's delays in the introduction of a new online-based business software for small and medium-size companies.

SAP is experimenting with augmented reality to show it can be used with its business applications.

On the SAP Web 2.0 blog, Timo Elliott calls it "Augmented Corporate Reality." The AR application is so far is only a concept, but it clearly demonstrates how SAP Business Objects could fit with Layar, an augmented reality browser. For those new to the AR world, Layar is installed on a smartphone. You point the camera at an object or location. Information is layered on top of the real-world image you see on the screen, based on what the smartphone camera is capturing.

SAP is preparing to launch a potential rival to Google Wave. The application, code-named Constellation, is described as a "virtual war room" where co-workers can collaborate in real-time with information aggregated from different data sources.

The cloud-based tool is now in private beta with the code name 12Sprints. The application is being developed by SAP's Business Objects division.

As we approach 2010, a number of new efforts are underway to make documents more social. One consultant told us how recently a client tried to turn Sharepoint into a Twitter client. That's a monster!

But we have to give SAP credit for developing a more innovative way to add social elements to PowerPoint presentations.

Not long ago John Schwarz, an executive board member at SAP, sat down for a video interview about the current state and future goals of the enterprise software giant's popular BusinessObjects BI and analytics platform, which Schwarz is in charge of.

The discussion was wide-ranging, but a key statement buried in all the talk about BusinessObjects was an admission that real-time access to analytics was vital for the future of the enterprise. If the future of the consumer Web is real-time streams of information and communication channels, then what will keep businesses caught up will be tools to analyze and iterate just as quickly. For an absolute leviathan in the B2B space, this is a huge acknowledgment.

Enterprise software giant SAP can now be your OpenID provider, according to a blog post from the company this morning. Through their pilot program, you can use an openid.sap.com subdomain as your single sign-on identifier.

The decision to become a provider stemmed directly from the SAP Community Network, which, in addition to being a central site, is connected to a whole host of partners that require separate logins. The aim is to let customers who use the SCN's resources avoid any headache as they move through the network.

Some traditional enterprise IT vendors are selling the line that SaaS is a passing phase, that it is "old wine in new bottles". They are telling their market that SaaS is really no different from the discredited Web 1.0 Application Service Provider (ASP) model or even that it is simply the ghost of the ancient mainframe Service Bureau come back to haunt us all. This post shows why their analysis is wrong. It also shows why some traditional enterprise IT vendors feel so threatened by SaaS and why the economic downturn just made this a major issue.