SAP Sales On-Demand
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SAP's SaaS CRM software strategy consists of two overlapping and quite confusing product lines - Business ByDesign and OnDemand. We hope the company will do a better job presenting these solutions in the near term. However, until then we'll simply provide our thoughts and opinions for these two products separately.

SAP’s Business ByDesign is a one-size-fits-all, subscription-based package aimed at midmarket companies. Business ByDesign is an inclusive ERP and CRM software suite which provides integrated accounting, supply chain, manufacturing, human resources and CRM. The on-demand suite cost $149 per user per month with a minimum of 25 users. Customers that require more limited access, such as for self-service utilization, will be $54 per month for a set of five users.

The new SaaS CRM software solution is a big portion of SAPs strategy to more than double its customer base to 100,000 by 2010. CEO Kagermann told Reuters that 2008 would be the year SAP would prove the technical viability and business case for Business ByDesign, which it hopes will eventually become more profitable than the rest of SAPs business. From 2010, SAP intends to win 10,000 new customers per year and $1 billion per year in new revenues from the new SaaS software. For now, SAP is slowly advancing Business ByDesign to select early adopters in the United States and Germany, followed by Britain, France and China. The company expects to have limited distribution until late 2008.

SAP OnDemand is a new product from a very recognized business applications company. SAP on demand is positioned for existing SAP clients to move into the on-demand space with little integration. SAP offers a hybrid architecture, combining the benefits of a hosted model with the reliability of an on premise deployment (with a number of comments about recent reliability problems with Saelsforce.com). The essence is that customers will use a single instance of the application which is run on the customers own database. SAP pointed out that this model will alleviate any cross customer outages due to a single database failure (again poking at Salesforce.com's outages).

Things we like about SAP OnDemand:

• Enterprise level product (not suited for small business)
• Isolated tenancy hosting model; SAP heavily promotes 'isolated tenancy' over the normal multi-tenancy model as a high availability (HA) means to protect customers from widespread system failures. Each client runs in IBM data center with own DB2 database and own IBM iSeries server. The on demand product is integrated with SAPs conventional applications to records updated in the on-demand service can trigger updates in other SAP apps. According to InformationWeek, this integration allows SAP to move customers to their packaged software.
• Great solution if you already use SAP R/3 or SAP on-premise products

Things we don't like about SAP OnDemand:

• We feel product is new, not mature and lacks flexibility and functionality
• A Network Computing review published on April 1, 2006 commented on several issues with SAP's on-demand solution:
  • Poor page to page performance - constant reload for every page.
  • No import or export capabilities.
  • Security profiles can only be applied to users and not roles.
  • Only supports IE browser (due to use of ActiveX controls).
  • Poor use and requirement for ActiveX to be used for synchronization and other purposes.
  • No import or export capabilities.
  • Built on SAP's NetWeaver platform (not an industry standard platform).
  • Not intuitive - "To create an account, you must first create a contact to assign to the account, but you can't simply navigate to the "New Contact" page without explicitly saving or canceling the account you're working on. You can't create a contact without an account either, and there's no way to create an account from the New Contact page. That's contrary to the process most salespeople follow, which is to start with a business card from his or her contact list."