Caught short by Salesforce, SAP targets 'front office' market

LONDON/BERLIN (Reuters) - SAP is unveiling its biggest product makeover in years by rolling up its sales, marketing and customer service software into a suite of tools linked to its business planning system, as it tries to catch up with faster-growing rivals like Salesforce. SAP, the world leader in "back-office" financial control systems, on Tuesday is making its long-anticipated move to bring together all its "front office" software - combining a dozen separate customer-facing products and recent acquisitions - into a single integrated offering it will call C/4HANA. Toward that end, Europe's biggest software firm said it had acquired CoreSystems, a Swiss firm specializing in customer service software, on undisclosed terms.