Widespread adoption of SAP's Business ByDesign will not occur
before 2010, but early adopters of the firm's long-awaited software
as a service (SaaS) offering stuck their heads above the parapet at
Sapphire in Orlando.
Business ByDesign was announced as a self-styled Salesforce.com
killer by SAP with an ambitious initial target of having 10,000
users by the end of 2010. Since then, those plans have been
radically scaled back and the roll-out slowed down significantly.
Currently there are only around 80 companies signed up to the
initial release, leaving rival SaaS vendors to accuse SAP of not
being committed to the cloud computing model.
But Leo Apotheker, SAP CEO, insisted he has enormous faith in
the new offering. "Business ByDesign is a great product that we are
very proud of," he said. "Business ByDemand is going to the world's
first and only complete integrated business suite available on
demand. If you don't believe that, take a look at some of the other
offerings around."
Among the early adopters at Sapphire was video conferencing firm
OneVision Solutions which became a customer late last year after
previously being a QuickBooks user. CFO Brent Walters said that
cost was a strong driver in making the move to an on demand
offering rather than a replacement on premise offering. The on
premise option carried implementation costs of $150,000 plus
programming and maintenance costs of more than $80 a year; Business
By Design came in at $100,000 implementation costs and $45,000 for
a 25-user subscription.
The SaaS offering has also enabled the firm to focus on core
competencies. "I don't have consultants living in the office or
have internal IT people," said Walters. "For me, that's priceless.
Our business is to sell video conferencing systems.'
SAP's reputation as an enterprise player with big-ticket
implementations has caused some to question its credentials for the
traditionally SME-focused SaaS market.
""I was nervous about the massive implementation I remembered
from a previous implementation of SAP," said George Bilkey, CEO at
TAM Ceramics, which rolled out Business ByDesign after evaluating
Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains as an alternative. "But I knew I
could trust SAP. We didn't have an IT department, we liked the
online aspect of Business ByDesign. To date we have been through 11
successful end of month closes without problems and the users love
the system."