SAP’s Business ByDesign (BYD) will be released at the end of July, marking the company’s next steps into the world of subscription services for enterprise customers.
It certainly is a small step into the SaaS world for SAP. And it has been a long time in coming for the company.
But it’s a start even though you hear many analysts scoff at the suggestion that SAP is showing any cohesive approach around cloud computing and its product offerings.
It’s symbolic of a general sentiment we encountered at SAP Sapphire Now. You sense that the company needs to find its bearings and develop a cohesiveness around its product strategy.
Though we know that BYD has its skeptics, we found the presentation of the user interface to be on par with major SaaS services. It also has the underlying infrastructure to make it a viable service for companies to extend the service in the manner they wish.
SAP’s Peter Lorenz showed us the service at Sapphire Now and how it performs on the iPad.
BYD is elegant on the iPad.
It’s a corporate directive to instill beauty into sophisticated, real-time SAP products. BYD uses Silverlight fro its front end display. It is decoupled from the back end system. It means that BYD can have one model rendered to different platforms. It’s pretty cool.
BYD connects to Google’s OpenSocial. It uses API’s that makes BYD a framework that customers can build upon.
In that sense, the BYD platform provide the capability to collaborate and perform transactional functions. Data for a customer can be mixed and edited between parties and then generated into a proposal.
That kind of combined capability could be powerful for small and medium sized businesses. Most smaller companies would prefer not to have an IT department. With BYD they can do the work to keep the company running without the concern about maintaining the technology on its own hardware.
That’s a compelling opportunity for the small and medium sized business. A service like BYD gives these smaller companies real-time capabilities, mobility and the option of paying on a subscription basis, starting at $149 per month, per user.
That’s the promise of BYD. Now the only question is how fast the service will be adopted and how this model is realized across the wide breadth of SAP technologies.
[Disclosure: SAP paid for a plane ticket and hotel room for Alex Williams to attend the the SAP Sapphire Now conference in Orlando.]
