SAP to halt development of Business ByDesign

http://www.zdnet.com/sap-to-halt-development-of-business-bydesign-report-7000022141/

by jmacd • 13 years ago

8 7 13 years ago

zdnet.com

robmcm1982• 13 years ago

Misleading title. Should be called "SAP stops development of crappy product, as it should have a long time ago"

vehementi• 13 years ago

Wrong title. SAP has many things in the cloud, this is not "its cloud strategy". This is one particular cloud product.

brbcoding• 13 years ago

This should have been done a while ago... Preferably before I took a course on it in school. Oh well, more useless knowledge from the broken-ass university system.

victorp132• 13 years ago

This post's title is now much improved, away from something akin to "SAP stops cloud strategy" to "SAP to halt development of Business ByDesign".

Business ByDesign was a horrible, lackluster way of offering ERP under the SaaS model. I've used it - and I was absolutely disgusted. It could not compete with the likes of Netsuite when it comes to the SMB market.

I've thought long and hard as to why SAP is not offering a 'true' SaaS product - the main reason I think is still lack of customer interest. Most of SAP's customers are large to very-large companies who require a crapton of customization to their ERP and other core systems. Their internal processes are simply not standard enough and hence a strict SaaS play product is not a great fit for large accounts.

On top of that the whole sales process to large accounts is radically different (and 'old skool') with consultants visiting customer sites and planning implementations... very traditional. It seems to be almost required still for ERP. Customers don't just whip out their credit card to set up an ERP system. Yet.

SAP still does plenty in the cloud but most customer requests are for IaaS type cloud hosting. SaaS is not done right at SAP right now, whereas I still think they /can/ do it - they certainly have the brainpower for it. I hope development efforts will shift to a fresh product that will rival Netsuite and target the SMB market.

Although having said that - Netsuite's revenue and market share compared to SAP are still tiny...

d4nt• 13 years ago

I agree. Having lived through an SAP implementation while at an in house IT department, I think SAP is more of a lifestyle than a technology. The whole point is that consultations are done, RFPs are written, sales executives shmooze, directors feel that buying SAP makes them important, consultants are hired and armies of business analysts are deployed. The servers you're running on, cloud or internal, are not an issue. Going after smaller businesses will take more than saying we'll run it on our servers for you. It'll be a massive cultural change for SAP.

logn• 13 years ago

SAP is not offering a 'true' SaaS product

That's not true anymore. They have this:

http://www.sap.com/campaigns/2013_Hana_Enterprise_Cloud/inde...

victorp132• 13 years ago

HANA Enterprise Cloud is a "managed cloud environment". In other words, IaaS or hosted applications at best; not a true SaaS play.

SAP to halt development of Business ByDesign

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