Blog: SAP's Business ByDesign: A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an Enigma

After nearly a week of all-things-SAP at the ERP giant's annual Sapphire Show, customers, bloggers and curious enterprise-software watchers have all done their best to sort through the major issues raised during the Orlando get-together. Analysis has not been in short supply.

One topic, thoroughly poked and prodded at the show and afterward, has raised many more questions that have yet to be answered: the future of SAP's fledgling on-demand ERP software product, Business ByDesign.

This was supposed to be a miracle cure for SAP with the mid-market, remember? This was supposed to let SAP tell NetSuite, Workday, Salesforce.com and the like what was what, remember?

You're a little fuzzy? Well, in all fairness, it's been a while.

Since being announced with much fanfare many moons ago, SAP has taken its foot off the BBD accelerator, capped the number of early customers, decreased the marketing message, confounded many partners, and, thus, lowered the expectations. The company's publicly stated reasons: ironing out back-office tech issues and ensuring that operational costs will be manageable.

Throughout the entire saga, which began back in 2007, SAP execs extolled (in one form or another) their "commitment" to Business ByDesign.

But a reading of Business ByDesign (or BBD) headlines from the blogosphere post-Sapphire confirms that SAP might be waffling on that "commitment." Or not.

Two articles, in particular, sum up the confusion best: Reuters' "SAP's Cloud Venture Fades as Rivals Gather Pace." And Enterprise Matters' "SAP's Business ByDesign Lives (And Reuters Gets It Oh So Wrong)."

OK.

Indeed, uncertainty abounds for those outside the gates of SAP's hauptquartier in Walldorf, Germany, and the cranium of newly christened CEO Leo Apotheker. We are left to speculation and the job of piecing together clues from vague quotes and slick demos at Sapphire.

But, to me, there's a question that seems obvious and important: What if SAP actually succeeds with Business ByDesign—then what?

First, I suppose, we must define what "success" would mean to SAP—because it surely means something different to SAP and to its customers, who would love nothing more than an alternative way to use SAP's ERP software, at a much lower cost.

BBD success for SAP, then, might mean a profitable SaaS product offering that would not—could not!—eat into SAP's on-premise, high-margin, maintenance-fee business. Vinnie Mirchandani, an ERP guru and former Gartner analyst, writes that SAP's strategy exec says the vendor views on-demand (SaaS) "as a very small part of their landscape."

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