The GUI for the hosted application is better than that of SAP's on-premises products, but the on-demand offering "lacks mission critical capabilities for complex sales organizations,' says Rob DeSisto, research vice president at Gartner.

For example, the first iteration of SAP Sales lacks quotation management functionality; the ability to generate a product-based forecast; and customization features that would let salespeople create formulaic fields or add new menu items such as price calculation tool, DeSisto says.

What will appeal to salespeople are the product's streamlined user interface and tool for performing ad-hoc queries of sales data, he says.

In the big picture, SAP needs to prove its worth to salespeople, not just those at the level of CIO and vice president of sales, DeSisto says. "It has not been successful doing this with its current CRM offering, which is the primary factor for the large amount of SAP CRM shelfware.'

Longtime partner IBM will provide application hosting services for SAP's on-demand products.