Beta site Du Pont Co. in Wilmington, Del., has already deployed the sales force automation service, called Sales On Demand, in its global operations, said Michael Michlovich, director of marketing and sales for Du Pont IT.

Without offering specifics about the implementation, Michlovich said Du Pont is using the service to complement the packaged CRM systems already in use at the company. He declined to name the supplier of those systems.

The Sales On Demand service offers a common set of business processes to the significant part of Du Pont's sales force that relies on manual processes, Michlovich said. Over the long term, DuPont hopes to integrate the hosted system with its SAP ERP software and retire some of the legacy CRM applications.

Peter Graf, executive vice president of SAP product marketing, described SAP CRM On Demand as a stripped-down, easy-to-use version of the existing SAP CRM suite. As a "hybrid" system, the hosted service will offer out-of-the-box integration with SAP's back-end ERP applications.

Looking to avoid service disruptions like those that have plagued rival Salesforce.com Inc., Graf said, the new service offers an "isolated" tenancy capability. With this feature, the whole hosted service won't crash as a result of the problems of a single customer.