Apr 1st 1999: SAP has approved an Australian vendor's plan to market a Web-based rental version of its R/3 software via accountancy firms.

Sydney-based Solution 6 Holdings is already a dominant supplier of business systems to the accounting profession in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, South Africa and south-east Asia, and is also present in the European and US markets. The deal with SAP marks a shift to an application service provider (ASP) strategy for the US$40m (A$63m) company.

Solution 6 will deliver SAP's R/3 suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications as a rented service which users access from a Web browser. It estimates the typical implementation timescale for small and medium size business customers will be around 30 days.

The vendor will also offer its own software products as an ASP service, general manager of global sales and marketing Richard McLean told ASP News Review in an interview this morning London time. The company has earmarked over A$5m (US$3.5m) for developing the project over the next six months, he said.

Solution 6 will market the online service initially to its customer base of chartered accountancy firms, beginning in Australia and then later globally. But its ultimate aim is to use accountants to bring its application services to the SME market.

"We believe the chartered accountant as trusted adviser to its clients has a really key role to play in helping the medium size and smaller companies take advantage of ERP software," said McLean.

SAP's support for the project includes agreement to Solution 6 offering short-term and transaction-based rental, McLean said. "SAP's pricing to us is relatively conventional, but we have the flexibility to translate that into a variety of different pricing structures that could involve time slicing and transaction-based pricing," he said.

The agreement also provides for larger organisations who are existing SAP licensees to transfer all or part of their licence to the Solution 6 service.

Several members of the Solution 6 management team previously worked with New Zealand Telecom's Internet service provider Telecom Xtra, including CEO Chris Tyler, who was general manager of the telco's Internet Services Group. The company, whose stock is listed on the Australian stock exchange, in February made an unsuccessful takeover bid for Canadian information management vendor PC Docs after the failure of protracted merger discussions.