SAP Baltic honchos talk about their deal with Lattelecom Technology

I talked to SAP Baltics managing director Carl Langhorn and a channel manager from Lithuania, whose name I may have confused :( about their "software on demand"  deal with Lattelecom Technology and the roadmap for SAP's small and medium business software as a service Business by Design solution. Since I had to use this video on my Latvian-language blog, the titles and intertitles are both in Latvian and English.

Lattelecom Technology to upgrade SAP applications

Lattelecom Technology, the IT integrator and IT service company owned by Lattelecom, is about to start a major project helping upgrade SAP's current suite of application to the next generation of the SAP platform.
The work will be the first project undertaken by Lattelecom Technology's so-called software factory using (when fully operational) up to 200 programmers and IT specialists in Latvia to write software according to a rigorously defined process and schedule.
The software factory idea is something that Valdis Lokenbahs, the current CEO of Lattelecom Technology (and formerly an executive with Dati Exigen) has been talking about for several years. Now he has organized teams at academic institutions in Jelgava and Rezekne and inside the company to work on the SAP applications upgrade.
Contracts to start doing the work are said to be ready for signing this month.

Lattelecom to offer mobile e-signature

Lattelecom Technology is offering a mobile e-signature that may finally get this dead horse of a e-government/e-services project going at last. In order to use their mobiles as e-signature devices, users will pay around LVL 5 to have the specialized program burned into a new SIM card for their mobile phones. It should work on most phones available on the market. It will also function on all of Latvia's mobile phone networks.
According to a spokesman for Lattelecom Technology, the mobile e-signature will allow secure identification of users of online government services, internet banks, e-mailed documents and the like. It may even enable card-free use of ATMs (bankomats) such as is said to be possible in Turkey. The mobile user will send an SMS to the bankomat and recieve cash without needing to insert a card and punch in a PIN code (forget it, and your card is often swallowed).
Lattelecom Technology helped to develop Latvia's e-signature, which has hitherto been distributed to several thousand government and municipal officials (at government expense). Uptake of the service (a gadget one attached to a PC, if I am not mistaken) by the private sector has been rather limited, perhaps a few thousand users (because of the expense). It has also been sold mainly through Latvia's shambolic (LV readers, think bardaks) postal service.
The mobile offering may finally make a widely-used product of the e-signature, which is actually a rather progressive and convenient way of secure dealing with government and private service providers.