In It for the Long Haul
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Rogers said he was encouraged by
comments made by SAP co-CEO
Jim Hagemann-Snabe that he is not counting on a rapid surge in new revenue from
Business ByDesign in the early stages. Instead, he is looking for a steady rise
in the number of users who start working with the product. That suggests, Rogers
said, that "they are willing to be in it for the long haul and they are willing
to absorb some financial hits against it as they go forward."
The new summer release of Business ByDesign will include what SAP
describes as a rich client user interface developed with Microsoft Silverlight
that will provide simplified navigation, interactive graphics and close
integration with Microsoft Office. The interface, which is designed to run
effectively on the Web, desktops and mobile devices, will also enable users to
create their own "mashups" of application services and content, according to SAP
officials.
Support for mobile devices will enable remote access to Business ByDesign
applications that SAP says will give users
greater operational flexibility at a lower total cost of ownership.
It will also include support for real-time,
"in-memory analytics" to support business intelligence and decision support
applications. Business ByDesign will enable bidirectional Microsoft Excel integration
that will let users access and manipulate data using Excel spreadsheets.
Next, SAP is recognizing that building a vibrant
user and partner community is essential to the success of an on-demand
application platform by making plans to "provide a development environment"
that will allow partners to extend the Business ByDesign platform with
"additional services, scenarios and industry-specific functionality." The
development environment will support the creation of vertical industry
applications that have been important to other SAAS platforms, such as
Salesforce.com.
With the new release, SAP will also have
Business ByDesign starter packages that give customers the basic "general
business" or "customers management functionality" for rapid deployment. As the
business grows, customers can expand their Business ByDesign installation and
turn on additional functionality built into the platform, according to SAP
officials.
One of SAP Business ByDesign's
prospective competitors, NetSuite, indicated that it has little reason to believe
that Business ByDesign will represent a serious market challenge in the near
term.
NetSuite has more than 6,600 customers and the company reports more than 1.4
million user log-ins, said Mini Peiris, NetSuite vice president of product
marketing.
Most of the features that SAP announced
for its summer release, such as real-time analytics, support for multi-tenancy
with a single-tenancy option, support for mobile devices, and a rich Web user
interface, are features that NetSuite has had for years, Peiris said.
The introduction of multi-tenancy for Business ByDesign at this stage in the
development of the on-demand software market demonstrates SAP's
"lack of understanding of the cloud in some ways," since "it took them this
long to rearchitect [the product] to get to a multi-tenant solution that they
feel they can now go to market with," Peiris said.
John Pallatto is eWEEK.com's Managing Editor News/West Coast. He directs eWEEK's news coverage in Silicon Valley and throughout the West Coast region. He has more than 35 years of experience as a professional journalist, which began as a report with the Hartford Courant daily newspaper in Connecticut. He was also a member of the founding staff of PC Week in March 1984. Pallatto was PC Week's West Coast bureau chief, a senior editor at Ziff Davis' Internet Computing magazine and the West Coast bureau chief at Internet World magazine.
