SAP:SAP Customer Relationship Management:

What is SAP?
SAP, started in 1972 by five former IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany, states that it is the world's largest inter-enterprise software company and the world's fourth-largest independent software supplier, overall.
The original name for SAP was German: Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte, German for "Systems Applications and Products." The original SAP idea was to provide customers with the ability to interact with a common corporate database for a comprehensive range of applications. Gradually, the applications have been assembled and today many corporations, including IBM and Microsoft, are using SAP products to run their own businesses.
SAP applications, built around their latest R/3 system, provide the capability to manage financial, asset, and cost accounting, production operations and materials, personnel, plants, and archived documents. The R/3 system runs on a number of platforms including Windows 2000 and uses the client/server model. The latest version of R/3 includes a comprehensive Internet-enabled package.
SAP has recently recast its product offerings under a comprehensive Web interface, called mySAP.com, and added new e-business applications, including customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM).
As of January 2007, SAP, a publicly traded company, had over 38,4000 employees in over 50 countries, and more than 36,200 customers around the world. SAP is turning its attention to small- and-medium sized businesses (SMB). A recent R/3 version was provided for IBM's AS/400 platform.
SAP Customer Relationship Management:

Features & Functions

SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) includes features and functions to support core business processes in the following areas:
Marketing – Analyze, plan, develop, and execute all marketing activities through all customer interaction points. This central marketing platform empowers marketers with complete business insights – enabling you to make intelligent business decisions and to drive end-to-end marketing processes. Quickly deploy marketing functionality in an on-demand model and transition to SAP CRM as business needs evolve.
Sales – Maintain focus on productive activity to acquire, grow, and retain profitable relationships with functionality for sales planning and forecasting, territories, accounts, contacts, activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, product configuration, pricing, billing, and contracts. Quickly deploy sales management functionality in an on-demand model and transition to SAP CRM as business needs evolve.
Service – Drive service revenue and profitability with support for service sales and marketing; service contract management; field service; e-service; workforce management; and channel service. Call centers, field service, and e-service provide various flexible delivery options. Quickly deploy service functionality in an on-demand model and transition to SAP CRM as business needs evolve.
Partner channel management – Attain a more profitable and loyal indirect channel by managing partner relationships and empowering channel partners. Improve processes for partner recruitment, partner management, communications, channel marketing, channel forecasting, collaborative selling, partner order management, channel service, and analytics for partners and channel managers.
Interaction center – Maximize customer loyalty, reduce costs, and boost revenue by transforming your interaction center into a strategic delivery channel for marketing, sales, and service efforts across all contact channels. Activities such as telemarketing, telesales, customer service, HR and IT help desk, and interaction center management are supported.
Web channel – Increase sales and reduce transaction costs by turning the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for businesses and consumers. Increase profitability and reach new markets with functionality for e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service, and Web channel analytics. Deploy these capabilities directly against SAP ERP or with SAP CRM as a fully integrated customer channel.
Business communications management – Manage inbound and outbound contacts across multiple locations and communications channels effectively and efficiently. By integrating multichannel communications with your customer-facing business processes, you can provide your customers and partners with a smooth, consistent experience across all avenues of contact, including voice, text messaging, Web contacts, and e-mail.

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