SAP-Salesforce Face Off

The Inevitable Comparisons: SAPs Business ByDesign versus Salesforce.coms Application Stack and Force.com Platform

SAP gets the midmarket, but the product still remains complex, according to Forresters Ray Wang. SAP has spent a considerable amount of research to understand this market … Yet simplicity and ease of use still remains elusive.

SAPs BBD is on demand, but its not multi-tenant. SAP had a top secret project originally code-named A1N headed by Shai Agassi to build multi-tenant, but the project was abandoned in January, according to Forrester. Salesforce practically

SAP has pulled the core of its Max DB database out of the open-source community and installed it smack in the center of BBD. It has also utilized its internally developed in-memory database in BBD to utilize faster queries. Salesforce utili

SAPs Business ByDesign suite is an integrated suite of ERP, CRM, SCM, SRM and compliance-based apps that allow users to kick off processes that travel throughout the applications. The question is where do customers existing applications fit into that sc

SAPs Business ByDesign suite is underpinned by NetWeaver, the companys integration and development platform. This fact will let customers and partners develop composite applications using SAP (and theoretically other) services, according to SAP. Gartner

SAPs focus on usability still falls short, according to Forresters Ray Wang. SAP talks about breakthrough user experience. The reality: BBD takes [SAPs] WebDynpro UI to a new level of configuration and manipulation. Drag and drop features showca

SAPs BBS suite is compliant with SOA (service-oriented architecture) principles, according to Gartner, which said that more analysis will be needed to assess if it will meet user needs. Salesforces Parker Harris said that the company is l

SAPs BBD is not customizable, according to Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker. It is, however, highly configurable. Its not clear how SAP will maintain all configurations if its not utilizing a multi-tenant architecture. Salesforce.coms applicati

SAP expects to add 10,000 BBD customers by 2010. Its not clear if thats a scaled back estimation of BBDs selling potential given SAPs Jan. 2006 goal to add nearly 65,000 customers in the same time frame. SAP said at the time that it would add customer

SAP has said BBD will be available in early 2008. References are not likely to be available at that time, according to Gartner. Salesforces Force.com Apex is available now. Winter 08, which includes Visualforce, will be available in the f

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