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Eager to tap into the emerging market for company Web portals, German software giant SAP has hatched a portal subsidiary and is shopping for a campus in Palo Alto.
SAP hopes to hire about 500 people worldwide for its newly formed SAP Portals. The push by SAP follows its $400 million acquisition last month of San Jose-based TopTier Software and its subsequent forging of a partnership with Yahoo to offer new "enterprise portals" for companies.
Analysts say the acquisition of TopTier, which SAP combined with its MySAP and e-SAP divisions to form the new' company, gives the software maker a technological edge over competitors such as Oracle, Baan and PeopleSoft in the emerging area of enterprise portals.
An en enterprise portal looks and acts like a personalized Web portal such as MyYahoo. Companies create them to offer employees customized desktops through which they can find information both on the Web and throughout a company's computer systems.
"The importance of a single point of access is obvious for anyone who has tried to find anything," says Hadley Reynolds,...