SAP’s Business ByDesign is “not a fantasy”
SAP’s on-demand ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite Business ByDesign “is not a fantasy,” CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe said during a press conference last week. Snabe was addressing quiet thoughts of attendees at the Sappire conference in regards to Business ByDesign’s postponed product roll out back in 2008.
SAP originally hoped to have 10,000 customers and $1 billion in revenue for the application by 2010 but they realized in 2008 they couldn’t run Business ByDesign at scale in a cost-effective manner. To date, only about 100 early customers are using the application.
The upcoming SAP Business ByDesign version 2.5 introduces an option for multitenancy, a key factor in making the software profitable. With multitenancy, a number of customers share the same instance of an application, with their data is kept separate. This cuts down on overhead for equipment and simplifies system management for the vendor, particularly upgrades, which can be delivered to many users at once. (A single tenant option will remain available but at a higher cost.)
SAP’s Business One is aimed at companies with 10 to 100 employees where companies are at a size where they need a certain level of business processes but don’t need advanced planning and scheduling algorithms. Their Business All-in-One, SAP’s high-end Business Suite, is meant for companies with 1,000 to 2,500 workers that are at the same level of business process literacy as most large companies.
With Business ByDesign, SAP can conveniently fill out that 100 to 1,000 employee-sized company gap. SAP has worked closely with telecoms to ensure working with Business ByDesign is a zippy experience, with average response times of a second to 1.2 seconds or “human interaction speed”.
In-memory processing in the upcoming release will allow the user to conveniently drill into various aspects of a transaction, examining data from various viewpoints, with the application rarely appearing to write back to or read from the database.
Sounds like SAP’s Business ByDesign is ready to be launched into the hungry jaws of mid-sized enterprises.
My personal opinion is their release of any Saas product is a mistake. The research isn’t too promising. On top of that, any company that puts ERP data out in the “cloud” is asking for MAJOR trouble. Wait until the first MAJOR data breach occurs and SAP will face massively bad press.
I’ve already written on this subject because I believe it is a mistake.
Where SAP is Missing a Key Business and Market Opportunity for Leadership
http://www.r3now.com/where-sap-is-missing-a-key-business-and-market-opportunity-for-leadership