SAP launches on-demand business service
Published: 20 Sep 2007 15:02 BST
Enterprise software giant SAP on Wednesday unveiled a mid-market on-demand service, Business ByDesign, putting it in competition with the on-demand offerings of Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Oracle.
The service aims to not only expand SAP's reach into the mid-market, but also to mark its entry into the hosted-applications arena, where it has been slower than its competitors.
Business ByDesign will offer a range of on-demand applications, from financials to procurement to customer-relationship management (CRM) software via a dashboard. The monthly service is set to cost $149 (£74) per user, per month, for customers with a minimum of 25 users. Customers that require limited access to the software, such as self-service entry for purchase confirmations, will be charged $54 per month for a set of five users.
"I have been at SAP for 25 years, and this is the most important announcement I have made in my career here," Henning Kagermann, SAP's chief executive, said during a press conference in New York. "We designed this product to launch a new business model. It's a new way to design, develop and implement business software."
The mid-market, Kagermann said, includes companies with a staff of approximately 100 to 500 that neither have, nor want, a sophisticated IT department to run their business software. He noted, however, that SAP mid-market customers serving a deep niche within an industry would probably forgo its ByDesign offering.
SAP currently has 20 customers that are involved in ByDesign's pilot in the US and Germany, and it is validating its service with customers in China, France and the UK. The company plans to expand its customer base in these regions throughout the year, with plans to enter additional markets next year in Australia, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, South Africa, Spain, Canada and Mexico.
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