More than two years after announcing its Business ByDesign software-as-a-service product for the mid-market, SAP said on Tuesday that it would release a new version of the software by mid-2010 that features a full multi-tenancy model, in-memory analytics, and a software development kit to enable partners to create add-on applications.
SAP executives, speaking at the company’s annual Influencer Summit in Boston, a gathering of industry market analysts and journalists, sought to rebuff criticism that SAP isn’t committed to the on-demand market. They also provided new details of the company’s strategy for the mid-market as well as large enterprises.
“SAP sees on-demand as the next serious change in computing models,” said John Wookey, executive vice president of business solutions and technology at SAP Labs and the driver of SAP’s on-demand strategy for large enterprises. “We are very serious about on-demand. Innovation in on-demand is still largely in front of us.”
Business ByDesign, which was launched in September 2007, has undergone a number of significant changes. Eight months after the launch, SAP said it would moderate its rollout to improve self-service provisioning, upgrades, and system performance. In August of this year, SAP released the first major BBD upgrade, called feature pack 2.0, which was said to boost overall functionality by about 30% and included several new features for manufacturers, such as a procurement function that automatically generates requests for quotation. The company said recently that BBD will not enter general release until sometime in 2010. Fewer than 100 customers are live on the product, and, for now, its sale is limited to six markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France, India, and Germany.
Yesterday, SAP executives said they would release by mid-2010 the next upgrade of the product. Feature pack 2.5 will include multi-tenant support, in-memory analytics, support for mobile devices, a user interface based on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, and a Microsoft Visual Studio-based software development kit for third-party application developers.
Multi-tenancy is a practice by which a single instance of a software program runs on one server and is accessed by multiple client organizations. In-memory is a technique used, for example, in database technology to enable more rapid processing of large numbers of records. Based on Microsoft’s .NET platform, Silverlight is a cross-browser plug-in for delivering so-called rich interactive applications for the Web. Microsoft introduced it in 2007.
Peter Lorenz, senior vice president of SME solutions, including BBD and SAP’s two mid-market on-premises products, All-in-One and Business One, said that SAP has just completed development on BBD feature pack 2.5. He said the product’s roadmap includes establishing what he called a “reliable six-month cycle” for upgrades. In 2011, SAP plans to release feature pack 3.0, which will include industry-specific versions of the product.
“Next year, we are ready to rumble,” Lorenz said.
There are currently about 100 companies in SAP’s Charter Client Program for BBD. Lorenz said this group comprises several industries, but the bulk are from the professional services sector. He also said there are about 2,800 resellers in SAP’s partner group for the SME market, which includes All-in-One and Business One. “Some will [sell] Business ByDesign,” he said. “We will have some new ones as well.”
SAP sketched out its overall on-demand strategy as a two-tier plan that covers large enterprises with so-called line-of-business applications and SMEs with BBD. Earlier this year, Wookey, in a speech in Amsterdam, laid out the company’s large-enterprise on-demand strategy, saying that products for this sector would tightly integrate with the Business Suite.