

SAP to halt development of Business ByDesign - jmacd
http://www.zdnet.com/sap-to-halt-development-of-business-bydesign-report-7000022141/

======
victorp13
This post's title is now much improved, away from something akin to "SAP stops
cloud strategy" to "SAP to halt development of Business ByDesign".

Business ByDesign was a horrible, lackluster way of offering ERP under the
SaaS model. I've used it - and I was absolutely disgusted. It could not
compete with the likes of Netsuite when it comes to the SMB market.

I've thought long and hard as to why SAP is not offering a 'true' SaaS product
- the main reason I think is still lack of customer interest. Most of SAP's
customers are large to very-large companies who require a crapton of
customization to their ERP and other core systems. Their internal processes
are simply not standard enough and hence a strict SaaS play product is not a
great fit for large accounts.

On top of that the whole sales process to large accounts is radically
different (and 'old skool') with consultants visiting customer sites and
planning implementations... very traditional. It seems to be almost required
still for ERP. Customers don't just whip out their credit card to set up an
ERP system. Yet.

SAP still does plenty in the cloud but most customer requests are for IaaS
type cloud hosting. SaaS is not done right at SAP right now, whereas I still
think they /can/ do it - they certainly have the brainpower for it. I hope
development efforts will shift to a fresh product that will rival Netsuite and
target the SMB market.

Although having said that - Netsuite's revenue and market share compared to
SAP are still tiny...

~~~
logn
> SAP is not offering a 'true' SaaS product

That's not true anymore. They have this:

[http://www.sap.com/campaigns/2013_Hana_Enterprise_Cloud/inde...](http://www.sap.com/campaigns/2013_Hana_Enterprise_Cloud/index.epx)

~~~
victorp13
HANA Enterprise Cloud is a "managed cloud environment". In other words, IaaS
or hosted applications at best; not a true SaaS play.

------
robmcm1982
Misleading title. Should be called "SAP stops development of crappy product,
as it should have a long time ago"

------
brbcoding
This should have been done a while ago... Preferably before I took a course on
it in school. Oh well, more useless knowledge from the broken-ass university
system.

------
vehementi
Wrong title. SAP has many things in the cloud, this is not "its cloud
strategy". This is one particular cloud product.

