SAP has beefed up its fledgling Business ByDesign SaaS offering by announcing a series of mash ups that connect with nine Web sites, including Google, eBay and Amazon.
The web services are intended to enable salespeople to gather prospect information and plan the ideal route. One or more Web services can be used with the software, or internal data services can be enriched with external or personalised information. "Providing our services within the solution enables users to be more productive," Bruno Bourguet, SAP's senior vice president of sales. "This is a great example of how Web services can add value in the business context."
The mash-ups include various Google services - Google News, Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Search, and Google Product Search. Mapping features heavily in the mash-up strategy with the inclusion of MapQuest to offers worldwide coverage, Falk to provie route planning services in Germany and Navteq/Map 24 to provide location-based and routing services. Business information comes from Business Wire, Hoovers and Morningstar. German phone listings are provided by GoYellow.de while eBay, and Amazon are also present.
In line with SAP's softly-softly approach to rolling out Business ByDesign, the nine Web services are not being offered globally but various services are available to the limited number of users in the US, UK, China, France, Germany, and India.
More preconfigured third-party services will be included in the next version of Business ByDesign, which is scheduled for release later this year. "Including pre-configured third-party Web services is a valuable enhancement to SAP Business ByDesign, as it improves user productivity and user experience," said Hans-Peter Klaey, SAP president of SME markets.
Despite the slow pace of the Business ByDesign roll out, Bill McDermott, member of the SAP Executive Board, insisted that speculation in the market that the firm is not committed to the offering is nonsense. “Business ByDesign will be a home run,” he said. “Business By Design is a break through product.“
Confused customers?
Some SAP customers are reported to be finding SAP's SaaS strategy confusing. Business ByDesign is specifically targeted at the very low end customers, whereas elsewhere within SAP John Wookey's development team are working on taking higher end SAP offerings into The Cloud.
McDermott said there is no reason for confusion, but said SAP needed to communicate its strategy very clearly. “You always need to communicate effectively what your offering is – and anything worth communicating is nearly always undercommunicated,” he said. “What John Wookey is doing is complementary to the [on premise] enterprise platform effort within SAP. That's what we mean when we talk about the hybrid approach.
“There may be confusion, but it won't be because of SAP. You look at the headlines and it's all about 'is it SaaS, is it on demand, is it Cloud?'. There's a difference between the pricing approach and the way that you derive value from software. What I am commiting to is that custoemrs can run our software on premise and on demand. We can configure the appropriate value consumption methodology for the way that these solutions are delivered. We are giving customers choice.”
McDermott added that there would be more activity surrounding Business ByDesign during the rest of the year, leading up to a major roll-out next year. To date there are 80 customers of Business ByDesign worldwide – 40 of whom have yet to go live with the offering.
