SAP Acquires Crossgate – Offerings and Uncertainties

[prateek]

SAP started investing in Munich based B2B integration provider Crossgate in 2008 and since 2010 started reselling Crossgate’s B2B offerings with name “SAP Information Interchange by Crossgate” (SII). Then, Gartner commented the following:

“The move has great potential, but success hinges on how quickly SAP can convince its users that it is really committed to B2B.”

SAP (according to 20^th September announcement) acquired Munich based B2B integration provider Crossgate. The acquisition is expected to close by 1^st Nov.  Although SAP is yet to announce the subsequent future plans, this news would definitely compel the skeptic B2B integration Think Tanks and Decision makers reassess their findings.

Good News

Crossgate is specialized in various B2B integration services and therefore SAP now has a strong B2B backbone to offer its partners. The major offerings are:

• SAP Information      Interchange to exchange business documents without dependency on EDI      sub-systems. Support for Rosettanet, EDIFACT, TRADACOM etc.
• Support of various      communication protocols like AS2, X400, HTTP(S), SFTP.
• Cloud based offerings      where Crossgate provides entire B2B solution as a Managed service.
• Crossgate e-Incvoicing      solution

Qualms

Crossgate was not the only company to which SAP showed interest till now for B2B offerings. SAP had close relationship with another B2B specialized firm, Seeburger. SAP has promoted such third party offerings religiously and used to acknowledge dependency on such partners for B2B communication. With acquisition of Crossgate, there are a few eyebrows raised with the following doubts:

• What is the future of current      SAP-Seeburger partnership?
• Will SAP continue to      resell third party B2B providers’ offerings?
• What recommendations does      SAP provide for customers looking for new B2B infrastructure?
• Should the partners looking      to upgrade their B2B landscape with Seeburger or iWay try to move towards      Crossgate?
• Are there any      recommendations for Customers looking for Cloud based offerings?
• Will Crossgate offerings seamlessly      integrate with SAP Process Integration (PI) and act as a part of upcoming      SAP Process Orchestration? 
• With Crossgate, will there      be any partner Program offerings about the capabilities and technical      details?

Summary

Customers were longing for a B2B space commitment from SAP and this acquisition will surely fill the gaps in SAP’s Business Process offerings. I look forward for a seamless utilization of Crossgate products along with SAP.  I very briefly touched upon various skeptic areas against which I hope to see some substantial assurances from SAP in near future. 🙂