SAP Positioning paper for the W3C Workshop on Multimodal Interaction


SAP is the recognized leader in providing collaborative business 
solutions for 28 industry sectors and for every major market.

SAP Research Centers study IT trends and deploy new technologies in 
real-life environments to determine their potential business value for 
SAP. As a result, we are able to introduce new technology and concepts 
for future solutions that will be strategically important to SAP and our 
customers.
SAP has strong interest in the field of web applications. Its Enterprise 
Portal [EP] makes use of the Web technologies to display the SAP portal 
contents on web browsers.

Emergence of new devices to interact with content infers new modalities. 
Furthermore, combination of devices creates new contexts of use, 
requiring multimodality. SAP Research leads research in the field of 
Multimodality, in scenarios such as portal augmented with Voice and PDA 
based access to information. Those project focus on a 
multimodality-enabling architecture and usability studies on the effects 
of new modalities.

SAP is a leader in research in the use of multimodal technology in 
real-world scenarios.  We have developed multimodal applications for 
warehouse and retail users, for travel management and for emergency 
response personnel.  We have collaborated with industry leaders 
including IBM and Motorola in bringing multimodal technology on mobile 
devices to the market.

We would like to contribute our understanding of the multimodal needs of 
enterprise users based on several pilot tests and user studies we have 
conducted over the years.

The interest of SAP Research in this workshop is to provide its view 
from a content perspective. Indeed, SAP is the leader in the Enterprise 
Resources Planning field, and as such provides a wide range of 
applications, from Customer Relationship Management to Human Resources 
and travel planning. Therefore SAP has specific needs on the future 
possibilities of the web standards, including work done from the MMI 
group. SAP Research wants to bring to this workshop its knowledge 
acquired during its research on Multimodality.