SAP Business ByDesign 2.5 Now Available

SAP's on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite Business ByDesign is not an urban legend. At the recent Sapphire conference, SAP CEO, Jim Hagemann Snabe, announced that the company would be making the highly sought after product more broadly available. The ERP suite will be ready to hit the cloud in July for German, US, UK, French, Chinese and Indian Markets.

SAP had originally planned for their ERP platform to be raking in $1 billion in revenue by 2010. The company realized they couldn't scale Business ByDesign in a cost-effective way, so in 2008 they slowed down the product roll out. SAP used the downtime to devise a strategy that would drive Business ByDesign's success. The ERP suite is only being used by about 100 customers at the moment.

The upcoming Business ByDesign 2.5 suite will feature an option for multitenancy. Multitenancy is a fancy way of saying, a single instance of software that is able to run on a server and be available to multiple client organizations. With multitenancy, overhead for equipment will be reduced and system management will be simplified. A single-tenant option will still be available for customers as well, at a higher cost.

Another update featured in Business ByDesign 2.5 is in-memory analytics that can be accessed through Microsoft Excel. The updated ERP suite also has mobile device support, a UI built with Microsoft's Silverlight technology, and a development toolkit that gives partners the ability to build extensions easily.

The biggest challenge SAP faced in rolling out the updated Business ByDesign was finding a way to attract customers without destroying their own SMB-installed base for on-premise ERP applications.

Business One is designed for companies with 10 to 100 employees. These smaller businesses need a certain level of business processes, but no advanced planning and scheduling algorithms. Business One is a server-based solution that is built in house, with support from a local partner.

Business All-in-One is SAP's high-end Business solution meant for companies with 1,000 to 2,500 employees. These companies are en par with the business process needs of large companies.

Business ByDesign is designed for businesses with 100 to 1,000 employees and basically an optimized version of Business One and Bussiness All-in-One. Business ByDesign gives companies the business process library they need without the IT organization.

SAP's updated product and new strategy is very "un-SAP-like". The company is no longer measuring their success by revenue. Instead the company is focused on customer growth. We're excited to see what SAP has in store, with their new customer-centric business model. We expect great things from the carefully crafted Business ByDesign 2.5 ERP suite as well.

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