While Owens-Illinois overall is committed to its existing mySAP ERP 2004 applications backbone, it has some small business units where an on-demand offering would make sense, he said.

"SAP is finally becoming an on-demand company," David Dobrin, an analyst at B2B Analysts Inc., said in a note. "But it appears that they've learned a few things from Salesforce.com. What they want the on-demand product to do is find a market that would never have bought the old product. Unlike most on-demand companies, they are exceptionally well funded. And though the product is still in its very early stages, it appears so far to be a very good and interesting piece of engineering."

An SAP spokesman said the on-demand applications will complement existing hosted CRM applications. More information on availability will be made public before the end of the quarter, and customers will be able to access the applications on a paid-subscription basis, he said.

James Niccolai, of the IDG News Service, contributed to this article.