SAP launches Business ByDesign

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SAP has finally this afternoon unveiled it long awaited and much touted software as a service (SaaS) business management application aimed at businesses of between 100 and 500 employees.

Branded Business ByDesign, SAP chief executive Henning Kagermann said its new offering was "radically different" to anything it had brought to market before.

Four years in development, the new hosted, SaaS offering is web and role-based by design, marking a departure from more deeply vertical focused offerings of the large enterprise products.

Kagermann also said it was not to be confused with its pure enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages or with SAP Business All-in-One (known as OnDemand before this launch) for midsize businesses of 500 or more people alongside SAP Business One for small organisations of less than 100.

In aiming Business ByDesign at the space in between, he said: "Our market research has found there are still a significant number of companies in this space who would like to move away from manual processes, spreadsheets and point solutions." Kagermann suggested there might be as many 1.5 million such businesses worldwide in a market it says is worth $15 billion (£7.5 billion), while SAP was aiming at gaining 15,000 of those as new Business ByDesign customers by 2010.

Although the SaaS delivery model is completely new to SAP, a lot of the features and functionality of its end-to-end ByDesign product draws on capabilities existing users of SaaS business management software like NetSuite, RightNow and SugarCRM are already familiar with.

At this afternoon's launch the company made much of its role-based interface and management capabilities that allows business and IT to administer, view, report on and interrogate the same operational data using familiar functionality, like drag and drop in real time and across mobile or PC-based devices.

Henry Morris, senior vice president for worldwide software and services for analyst IDC said: "This unveiling is a promising start for SAP, with these challenges to be addressed before product release: firming up the go-to-market model with wide reseller support, demonstrating needed application scalability for midsize companies who intend to grow and solidifying linkages between existing applications and the new solution."

The new product has been trialled with 20 live customers in the US and Europe for the last six months. And today's launch offers, new US and German prospective customers a personalised trial and an average price of $149 (£74.56) per user. SAP also said the service is also now available for early users in the UK, France and China.

SAP also plans to include the new offering as part of the SAP PartnerEdge programme next year. Current SAP resellers will be invited to apply and qualify, with the expectation that they will build a new business around SAP Business ByDesign that reflects its volume nature and requirements.

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