As SAP releases the latest update to its Cloud-based offering, Ian Anstey, Business ByDesign UK chief has told BusinessCloud9.com he believes there is a surge in interest and in purchasing of Cloud-based ERP solutions, and that businesses are looking for companies with “the brand reputation, longevity, and profitability of an SAP to bring solutions to market.”
It also became clear who the company views as its main rivals in the space, with Anstey naming Salesforce.com and Sage, as well as rival Cloud ERP firm Netsuite. While he argued ByDesign competed with all of them in “different set of circumstance depending on what the client is trying to achieve,” it was a later reference to Netsuite’s client base that revealed which rival SAP has set its sight on primarily surpassing:
“NetSuite has something like 6,000 clients and they’ve been going for ten years. We’ve been going for a couple of years and we’re on target to reach a thousand by the end of this year, so I think it’s clear we’ve been ready for primetime for some time, and the reach and growth of ByDesign is just happening on a rolling basis. ”
He adds the company “absolutely” has ByDesign clients and partners in the UK, but says he’s not at liberty to discuss any figures. The latest release of ByDesign sees a number of enhancements, including additional language support and further functional capabilities for industries, and comes as SAP launches an online community for customers and partners to:
“provide feedback directly to us online in terms of where they want particular functionality and where we can add real value to the business and the industry.”
Anstey continues, and defends the twice annual ByDesign releases, stating:
“We’re trying to make significant progress with each release rather than doing bits and pieces it’s just part of the strategy we’ve adopted as a company. We’ve always done that; right from the beginning of SAP we’ve pretty much done two releases a year, and we’ve just formalised that strategy. From our perspective it’s a case of wanting to add significant value when we do a new release, and obviously having the time to add the level of functionality and capability as part of our two core releases. “That doesn’t mean to say that new modules and new applications and functionality won’t be available, because obviously our partners can create new modules and applications themselves and put that into the ByDesign world as and when they’re ready. ”
According to Anstey, ByDesign’s position in the market is squared at SMEs and subsidiaries of large enterprises looking for:
“a single integrated suite that enables the business to be run entirely in the Cloud. If you look at the SME market, traditionally those small businesses have grown up by selecting point solutions and implementing them on a fairly piecemeal basis. It then becomes a decision on whether to buy an integrated suite to replace all those solutions? Do you take a systems integration project? Do you go back to choosing point solutions? I think it depends on where any given company in its business development cycle, and we are trying to support small businesses as well as the top end of the SME space and subsidiaries. ”
Asked to explain SAP’s definition of a small business, Anstey says:
“We have clients who have ten employees, and we have clients who have 250 employees. In some of the subsidiary companies we’re working with, it’s substantially more than that. [ByDesign] can actually entirely bridge the SME gap. ”
He continues to discuss SAP’s strategy for ByDesign, which enables its existing clients to take advantage of Cloud-based solutions where they want:
“but it is absolutely our objective to be a leading provider of Cloud-based end-to-end solutions for those clients who want to run their entire business in the Cloud. ”
Anstey takes another swipe at some of its pure Cloud rivals, adding:
“At least we have a multi-tiered strategy that enables clients who want to buy on premise, to buy on premise; to put what they want to in the Cloud, and to go mobile where they want to…It’s not an either or choice with SAP; you choose what you want to do in the way you want to do it, when you want to do it. ”
He also argues the delayed deployment of ByDesign wasn’t to stop it from cannibalising SAP’s installed base, and said neither SAP or any other software vendor could dictate where the market goes:
“There are those clients who will want to buy on premise solutions; there are those clients both existing and new who will want to buy on demand solutions, and there are those who will want to buy mobile solutions. Our job as a vendor and a provider of business applications is to enable clients to buy and consume in the way they want to. After the initial release of the software back in 2007 we wanted to work with those clients that committed to us, to ensure we were delivering the platform for the best possible solution going forward. That’s what we did when we released the two releases last year, and we’ve continued with that strategy this year.”
