SAP AG and BackWeb Technologies announced an agreement to leverage BackWeb’s Internet communication infrastructure and selected application modules as part of the SAP Customer Relationship Management offerings. The SAP Sales, SAP Service, and SAP Marketing solutions together make up a CRM solution designed to manage the entire life cycle of customer relationships. The combined solution provides customers with intelligent information gathering from the Internet and intranet that is easily delivered to the desktop for efficiency and enhanced decision-making capabilities. Specifically, the agreement with BackWeb includes bundling the BackWeb Foundation, the Automated Marketing Encyclopedia and the Market Intelligence Manager with both the SAP Sales and SAP Service solutions. The BackWeb Foundation, BackWeb’s Internet communication infrastructure, is a priority communications system based on a set of technologies that enable an organization to capture information from any data source and efficiently and reliably deliver it throughout the extended enterprise. The Market Intelligence Manager automatically gathers information about competitors, customers and the marketplace from any Internet or intranet location. The Automated Marketing Encyclopedia automatically delivers large documents to multiple users reliably and securely. BackWeb enables companies to adapt quickly to changing market conditions through direct interaction with their sales and service personnel, thereby accelerating the execution of their business processes www.backweb.com