CRN Interview: SAP's Claus Heinrich

Claus Heinrich, a member of the executive board of ERP software giant SAP AG, spoke with Editor/News Steven Burke about Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and SAP's partner strategy at the Forrester Research Executive Forum.

CRN: How quickly do you see RFID being adopted?

Heinrich: Companies like Wal-Mart are determining the pace at which other companies have to implement RFID. Wal-Mart made the statement that every supplier has to be RFID-compliant. And the Department of Defense just announced that all suppliers must be RFID-compliant. %85 Business strategy drives the incorporation and the implementation of technology. I predict that RFID will become more and more the input channel of all our IT data.

CRN: How big of an opportunity is this for the systems integrators and services providers?

Heinrich: I see that there will be a strong market, a phenomenal market, very, very soon.

CRN: What kind of investment is SAP making in RFID?

Heinrich: We will be a supplier of RFID technology because this belongs to the application. If you do a goods receipt via RFID, it is still a goods receipt. You have to post it. You have to report it and so on. The only thing that changes is how the input comes in. %85 Technology is only the enabler for the application.

CRN: Has SAP already done the work to RFID-enable SAP applications?

Heinrich: If we enable infrastructure with RFID, every application can leverage it. For example, we have written [RFID capabilities] in our newest supply chain management [application] %85 so everything is now enabled in that environment.

CRN: How important are partners that have not traditionally worked with SAP?

Heinrich: We continue to gain market share. That means we have to partner with others to implement our new software and integrate it with other software. %85 Most of our implementations are through partners, and this will not change.

CRN: How big a push is SAP making to go after SMBs with partners rather than the traditional SAP direct-sales and consulting model?

Heinrich: I think we have to do both. Our large customers who have a lot of small subsidiaries want to use our sales channel. On the other side, there are a lot of independent software vendors which we have a different model with because they are smaller.