All about enterprise business applications

Challenges of ERP systems

2012-01-14T09:05:00.001+08:00

The implementation result of ERP is difficult to achieve the value expected. Why?

1. The complexity of ERP systems. Too complex. No. of tables and no. of fields of each table keep growing version after version. It is very difficult for customer IT department, implementation consulting companies or even vendors themselves to understand and manipulate such complexity.

2. ERP systems do not focus on a certain industry. Too general. Finally, companies need to tailor-made the general system to fit their need. Otherwise, the operation efficiency will be bad after introducing such general system.

The solution.

1. Modulize the ERP systems. Split the complex system to small sub-systems and design the product from the beginning for easy integration.

2. Be deeply industry focus.

3. Return the daily support of the ERP systems to the vendors, i.e. the cloud model.

2011 - A review

2012-01-01T10:24:00.000+08:00

1. Hot: Deployment of enterprise mobile apps on iOS and Android devices.

2. Hot: Cloud computing - SaaS, IaaS, PaaS

3. Hot: Connecting enterprise PR, recruitment, marketing functions with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Sina Weibo.

4. Traditional ERP giants SAP and Oracle lacked the gene to grow in the market of cloud software. Instead, they chose acquisition. PE ratio for cloud software vendor Salesforce.com was still crazily high. A typical bubble, at the cloud.

5. The top 3 vendors of ERP: SAP, Oracle, Microsoft continued the market domination.

6. Hot: Virtualization

7. Nobody could stop Android mobile phones, even the ITC. Nokia made a bad choice to commit to Windows Phone only.

8. Chromebook was a failure, at least in year 2011 and will continue to be a failure in 2012.

9. Byebye Adobe Flash and Silverlight, HTML5 become the standard to present video on web pages.

10. NoSQL database, In-RAM Database, Big Data, what else?

SAP acquires SuccessFactors with $3.4billions

2011-12-04T20:06:00.001+08:00

SAP yesterday announced that it will acquire HR SaaS vendor SuccessFactors with $3.4 billions, an amount about 10 times of SuccessFactors' annual revenue. SAP likes acqusitions now. It does not has the patience to wait 10 years to grow its cloud business. With SuccessFactors, SAP becomes one of the major players in cloud business applications, although the revenue of SuccessFactors still lags much behind Salesforce.com, which has sales revenue about 2 billion this year.

So what does SuccessFactors' application actually do? Its main function is employee performance management, i.e, managing the processing of employee appraisals. SuccessFactors has about 3500 customers and 15 million subscribers. That means each customer has an average of 4285 employees. With an annual revenue about $360 million (base on the revenue of the latest quarter, 91million), each subscriber contributes an average of $24 each year, or $2 per month.

SuccessFactors loses money in all these years. The cost of selling is high, like other cloud business application vendors.

SAP Mobile App Store

2011-11-12T06:43:00.001+08:00

SAP has just launched its mobile app store and welcome their partners to submit apps there for sales. Interesting. I would like to see how far the coming apps will go, whether they can eventually shift a large percentage of input interface from traditional PC to mobile devices. Currently, the no. of apps is not much, and only running on smart phones, which limits the functions they can handle.

After checking the app store web site, my first impression is the UI of the apps look simple and dull. I hope some partners can submit apps with more handsome UI.

Build a Platform, not a Product or a Solution only

2011-10-16T20:34:00.000+08:00

Steve Yegge, a Google engineer, recently published a long comment on Google's shortcoming. Steve mainly complained Google management did not aware the importance of the accessibility of its products. Steve argued that Google were creating products, but not platforms and he thought that only platforms could be competitive and lasted for long.

I thought this is also true in enterprise software area. ERP Vendors who can build a platform or an ecosystem can finally win the competition. Vendors who only want to lock their application system will finally lose. Improve the accessibility implies that to let third parties to make money on the platform. Only that such third parties will help a vendor to promote their platform, and the related solution, and increase the popularity to let the vendor earn much more on licencing the platform. If a vendor want to control everything on their product, from implementation service, support, add-on enhancement, etc, it will definitely scare away any potential partners and make the vendor fight alone in the competition.

Besides, it was also true that nowadays if a company purchases an ERP system, they should realize that they are not just purchasing a product, or even a solution, they should purchase a platform, a platform which is extendable and can host additional solutions from third parties or in-house development.

Steve Jobs, a forever icon of innovation

2011-10-08T07:50:00.001+08:00

6th October, 2011, a broken heart day for Apple fans.

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. " (From Steve Jobs' Standard University Speech on June 12, 2005)

Demand Driven MRP

2011-09-28T04:30:00.000+08:00

Frank Scavo recently wrote a blog post on DDMRP, Demand Driven MRP, and said DDMRP was a breakthrough of MRP in last 30 years.

I did not go through very detail on DDMRP. I tried to understand from Frank's post and the Youtube video made by Demand Driven Institute, the proponent of DDMRP.

Factories normally need to keep stock of key components, critical materials, in order to fulfill demand in a short lead time. The effective way to improve over-stock or under-stock of critical materials is to improve the supply chain visibility, i.e, to make your forecast data keep track with actual market and supplier capacity as close as possible.

My impression is DDMRP improves the technique of MRP by suggesting to keep a variable level of safety stock of critical materials. In tradition, normally you will keep a constant level of safety stock and adjust it according to other factors, like seasonal factor or promotion.

This is an improvement, but not a breakthrough concept like JIT or TOC. Anyway, I have just purchased the book, maybe I can talk more after reading it.

Related Posts
MRP Timeline
Why APS software package difficult to work in factories

Infor ERP Ln 6.1 - Major enhancements benefit contract manufacturers

2011-08-28T08:55:00.005+08:00

In the 1990s, many large electronics contract manufacturers were using BaanIV as their core ERP products. These manufacturers included Flextronics, Solectron, Wistron, Benchmark, HTC.... It was interesting that BaanIV actually did not have many specific functions for the contract manufacturing industry. About 10 years ago, Baan customer Wistron did an evaluation on four ERP products (Oracle, SAP, JDE and Baan5.0c) and gave Baan5.0c the lowest ranking. These manufacturers normally customized Baan to fit their requirement. Most of them didn't like the week functions of BaanIV for contract manufactures, but they did like Baan Tools to give them the flexibility and ease of use on customization.

Nowadays, most of these Baan customers have switched to SAP ERP which has an industry solution for electronics industry. Another major reason for them to switch is they cannot get enough support from Infor to continue to use the Baan products. Those haven't switched yet are only because they don't have the budget to do so.

The new version of Baan (Infor ERP Ln 6.1 ) finally have some major enhancements for contract manufactures, although these functions were late for more than 10 years. These major enhancements are:
1. Vendor managed inventory
2. Subonctracting with material in/out handling
3. Allocation and hard pegging
4. Alternative material handling

An purchase line on a material is hard-pegged to a sales order of a product

Is HP heading to the right direction?

2011-08-20T11:30:00.003+08:00

HP announced the intention to spin off its PC business and turn the focus to enterprise software in the future. HP planned to acquire Autonomy, which is the second largest software company in Europe, just after SAP AG. It seemed the investors did not favor the decision. HP's stock price dropped 20% after this announcement, making HP's current market capitalization smaller than that of SAP AG.

HP's current business coverage is diverged, from consumer market to enterprise market, from hardware to software, like a combination of IBM and Dell. Now HP's management prefers to become another IBM. The current HP management team came from SAP AG. They are much more familiar with enterprise software market than the low margin PC hardware market. Doing something you are familiar with is always the golden rule to be successful in business. From the moment HP's board of directors hired SAP AG's former CEO to replace Mark Hurd, it had been determined HP would focus on the enterprise business area. Spinning off the PC business is a logical decision.

Infor Audit Team kicking loyal Baan customers away

2011-06-22T11:52:00.002+08:00

Today I read a post message on baanboard.com from a sad Baan customer, jmartin.

He wrote,
"Here in Spain they are engaged in a "suicide" strategy by trying to catch money from good old customers still using BaaN IV via some software usage audit procedure , which comes simply into a money requirement for using the old BaaN IV source code (provided by them long ago as a sales argument, and even under written source code usage agreements) based in legal tricks in general purpose common clauses about intellectual property in the license contracts. Even the procedure followed looks more like a mafia lawyers film (hidden menaces, frightening messages, ...) than a normal customer-supplier negociation ..... This fool attitude removes completely any confidence in the Infor company and obviously eliminates any doubt about discarding LN or any other Infor product as replacement for Baan IV in the next future..

This is really sad for people like me , who have bee working with Baan for more than 15 years now.."

I can say same things happened in other countries also. Infor software licence audit team seems to use all kinds of method to urge existing Baan customers to let them audit the usage of Baan software, in order to achieve their sales target. I would like to suggest Infor to put the audit team under the control of support team or sales team and take a more civilized approach during auditing. Many customers stopped to pay annual support maintenance fee after being charged for the source code and near all promised not to deal with Infor in the future. Auditing is a common practice. The problem I think is the attitude and approach of the audit team which make customers feel offended. Customers are not thieves. If they modify the source code, there is a good reason for them to do that. And who provided the source code to them? It was also the former Baan Company support team, sales team or implementation partner provided. And why did such parties provided the source code? It was because if they didn't do that, the promise commited during the sales cycle cannot be fulfilled.

Be smart, Infor management, don't do such silly thing to doom your reputation. Give all old Baan customers an exemption to use the source code they have already modified and inform them not to modify in the future. Such action will bring much more value than what you can earn from fining them. And even you would like to fine them, be reasonable. Most customers, if ever changed the source code, just changed a small portion of the code, less that 0.1%. Then why do you charge them for an amount which is large enough to scare them away from doing business with you in the future?

Why so many companies use Microsoft Dynamics Ax today, a former Baan customer told me, it was because Microsoft provided all the source code to them. "The provision of source code is put clearly in the license contract of Ax", he emphasized this.

How to interpret this in this context? How about "Angry customers kicking Infor away"?

Infor reported its sales figures in Q4 2011

2011-06-19T11:10:00.003+08:00

Infor recently announced that it achieved an organic growth of 28% on software licence in Q4 2011 and disclosed the sales figure in this quarter was $509.8 million.

Infor is not a public listed company. It has no obligation to announce its financial data to the public. Infor's announcement definitely indicated the management team's confidence in the company's future growth.

It is interesting that this figure also shows Infor exaggerated themselves as a 2 billion company for several years in the past. After the acquisition of SSA in 2006, Infor always described themselves as a '2 billion' software company. But it seems now Infor has never achieved this target figure.

I think Infor customers should welcome the moves of this software vendor after the on-board of Charles Philips. What I mean are the release of Infor ION and Infor Workspace, the acquisition of Lawson Software, the new program to shift more focus to channel sales and this one, its willingness to share sales figures with public.

On demand, On demand

2011-06-04T07:17:00.017+08:00

Derek Singleton from softwareadvice.com recently had a brief interview with a QAD marketing person about QAD on demand solution during QAD's annual user conference. The latest quarterly financial report of QAD showed that subscription revenue contributed $2.2million, comparing with $6.3 million traditional on premise license revenue in the same quarter. Subscription revenue here included on-demand revenue, but not limited to on-demand.

On-demand basically implies customers don't need to invest in hardware and software license, but pay a monthly fee to rent. The implementation procedure, and so the cost, of on-demand or on-premise are not different. Today's hardware cost is not that much, comparing with implementation and maintenance cost. The cost to keep a capable internal team to manage business systems is high. A large portion of ERP system failure are not due to poor implementation, but due to poor system and knowledge management after implementation. Therefore, put the routine management of complex business systems back to the vendor or to a third-party team of professional support engineers should be quite logical, and I think this should be the primary reason for a company to consider on-demand solution. You use the systems, and you don't want to manage them.

The major concern among business application customers towards on-demand solutions are still data security and cost. Hackers should be proud of themselves to break in big clouds to get useful data or just for fun. Besides, on-demand business solutions do not imply lower cost. The cost to run a big cloud can be huge. The evidence is the two pioneer vendors on on-demand solutions, Salesforce.com and Netsuite, are still losing money each year. Hope these two are only exceptions.

UI Isolation may come true in the era of Tablet Devices

2011-05-30T06:50:00.002+08:00

What is UI isolation? I could not find an appropriate terminology. UI = user interface. Isolation means user interface is not related to the brand of applications we are using. Or put it more straightforward, no matter we are using Oracle e-business suite, SAP ERP or Microsoft Dynamics ERP, we can use the same user interface to input data, print out report, check order status, get an update of inventory level, etc.

On tablet devices, due to its smaller display area, we tend to design specific user interface, i.e., mobile apps, for each group of users, to reduce irrelevant data on the screen and increase users' efficiency. This is also the potential of Sybase Unwired Platform(SUP), to drive users away from general ERP interface and go to use specific user interface to increase the efficiency and reduce the learning curve for new users.

Such mobile apps are not connected directly to an application server of ERP. Instead, they are connected to an mobile app integration server first, like SUP, and then from there they are routed to ERP application server. Therefore, by putting different set of data mapping logic (or adapters) on the integration server, the same mobile apps for entering, for example, a purchase requisition, can be connected to different brands of ERP.

The cost and time to get end users familiar with a new system can be huge for a multi-national companies, which have over 10 thousands of end users. The advantage of UI isolation is to eliminate user training for switching business applications, and reduce the disruption to operation of business.

UI isolation, not something new

Mobile Business Apps & Sybase Unwired Platform

2011-05-21T07:33:00.003+08:00

Mobile phones and tablet devices are becoming major input devices for business applications. SAP is promoting its mobile application platform, Sybase Unwired Platform, to their enterprise customers. Unwired Platform was the core component of the older Sybase iAnywhere mobile product suite. It seems SAP has ceased to use the 'iAnywhere' brand.

The interactive devices between business application users and backend application servers has evolved from dumb terminals, native clients on Windows Pcs, web pages and then to mobile devices.
We will see more business application users using mobile devices, especially tablet devices, to handle their daily business transactions. Such users are not limited to traditional field service, shop floor and warehouse people, who has used mobile devices for a long time. People who sitting in the office are also likely to use tablet devices to replace traditional PCs and notebooks.

The major reason to make tablet devices popular is because Apple's iPad has set a new standard on the design and price level of tablet devices, which has proved to be well accepted by the market, for PC vendors to follow. I expect the coming release of Windows 8, which is designed to fully support tablet devices, will push the adoption of tablet devices among enterprise users faster.

To develop, deploy and manage such mobile applications on tablet devices is a big market in this decade. SAP caught up this wave of mobile device business opportunity by acquiring Sybase last year. I expect other vendors like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are offering or will offer something similar. But surely SAP has the advantage for connecting mobile application to its ERP products, which almost dominates the high end market.

Related Posts:

SAP acquires Sybase

Mobile Enterprise Application Platform

Chromebook and Skype

2011-05-15T07:38:00.003+08:00

Microsoft announced to pay 8.5 billion US$ to purchase Skype. Certainly, Microsoft's is not eying on Skype's technology, but its customer base. Skype has over 600 million registered accounts. Each account contributes 14 US$ in the acquisition. It is difficult to say whether Skype worth the money. The major point is Microsoft has the money and it seems it cannot spend the money on something better. I expect Microsoft will create such product mix,

1. Skype + MSN + Hotmail, to compete with Facebook
2. Skype + Bing + Office 365, to compete with Google search and Google Docs
3. Skype + Windows Phone 7 to compete with Apple iPhone and Google Android

Ok, but the result depends on execution. Microsoft's reputation to turn acquired product into further success is so so.

How about Chromebook? It seems only Google is excited about Chromebook. I am not impressed. The product is designed for enterprise market, it is not for consumer market. But even for enterprise market, I doubt about that any CIOs will have interest to deploy such computers. Ok, but the major point is Google has the money and it is so eager to challenge Microsoft in the OS market.

2011 enterprise applications trend

2011-04-26T06:57:00.002+08:00

I found this presentation on enterprise application trend in 2011 worth a look. Although it was talking about Israeli's market, I think it could reflect some general trend in other developed countries as well.

SaaS, industry solutions are the general trend of enterprise applications. Selling a general purpose ERP product is difficult now.

MRP Timeline

2011-04-09T20:52:00.004+08:00

I received an email from a gentleman Derek who asked to write something on a MRP timeline he edited. I don't know much about the history of MRP, so I don't have much comment on the events attached to the timeline. I think the events he listed are all importants milestones in MRP history.

MRP is not a difficult task for today's computers, even a personal computer can get the result fast. The major challenge for a manufacturing company to benefit from MRP is still how to maintain good data accuracy, and build a workflow to response fast to sudden change of demand, product design, material supply and production capacity.

I don't think today's MRP systems or ERP systems has many improvements in terms of productivity gain, comparing those created in the seventies of last century. The major change of the systems in the past several decades was to port the systems from mainframe to AS400, then from AS400 to Unix and Windows, and to port the programming language from Cobol, RPG to C, then from C to Java, and then maybe port from Java to C again.

I don't like the term of ERP. I think 'ERP' will eventually disappear. No vendors dare to sell a system which is capable to handle everything for a company. It is difficult to price such system. That's why today a company still need to purchase PDM, CRM, WMS, EAM, SCM.. systems. If there is a such system to handle everything, it will be very complex to maintain and to use. I am not able to predict the trend of business system development in the future, but it can be sure that simple, modular systems will eventually replace large, complex systems.

Related Posts:

Why APS software package difficult to work in factories

Lawson - Ready for sale

2011-03-12T20:58:00.000+08:00

About two and a half years ago, I wrote a blog post to suggest the investors of Lawson to take some action to maximize their return on this software business.

Choice 1. Sell Lawson Software to Oracle, providing Larry will like Harry to disappear.
Choice 2. Sell Lawson Software to Infor, providing Jim can borrow enough money to buy it
Choice 3. Ask Harry to slash the headcount of sales team, start to give out software licence free of charge to the install base, and increase the maintenance charge to 22% of listed licence fee, which is the new industry standard, if not yet.

Now Infor and its holding company Golden Gate have made the offering to acquire Lawson, this is my advice number 2. I am not sure whether Oracle will step in to compete for Lawson, probably not, because Oracle likes to grasp the winners. Lawson is not a typical target for Oracle, although Oracle also relies on maintenance income.

A brief comment on Infor ERP Ln version 6.1 FP7

2011-02-24T10:54:00.006+08:00

Infor ERP Ln 6.1 FP7 is the latest release of Baan ERP software. I have browsed the version difference guide and it seems this version again has some good features added.

I like the following new features or improvements.
1. enhanced customer relation management module. Now, this module can function as a small CRM system.
2. enhanced product configuration module, with 3rd party advanced product configurator integrated(BuyDesign). Finally there is a replacement of the former e-configurator software.
3. Can link pictures to several sessions, like employee session, see attached picture.
4. Report operations complete has an option not to post inventory. There is a parameter to control not to post inventory to warehouse when report operations completed. (How about report order completed?)
5. Multiple super users for payments and direct debits. Small enhancement, but good.
6. Calling web service with Baan 4GL
7. Integration with Microsoft Sharepoint server for document storage. Therefore you now get three options to store document on Baan, through ODM, through ECM function of PLM 8, through Sharepoint.
8. Integration with Microsoft Reporting Service. Does this imply that in the future Infor will not support BIRT any more? Due to the weak report export function of Baan report, the vendors of Baan chose different report server tools to work with Baan ERP. First was Crystal Report, then Cognos Reportnet, then BIRT, now Reporting Service. I think this new choice on Microsoft technology can last for long.
9. Now supports landed cost

I notice there is a increase of the number of dimension code from 5 to 12 in the general ledger module. Maybe some customers can benefit from such increase. But 5 dimension codes are quite enough for most Baan customers.

I agree with Gartner's magic quadrant report that Infor should improve the Baan built-in reporting engine and the report export function. Bundling with an external reporting server is not the solution, just a work around. I am sorry that we cannot see any improvement in this area on this new version, again.

Nokia abadons Symbian too early

2011-02-20T16:21:00.002+08:00

I still cannot understand the decision made by Nokia management to abandon Symbian and switch completely to Windows Phone in the future. For a company as big as Nokia, it should not be a problem to produce smart phones base on different OS. Besides, if Nokia still needs to sell another 150 million Symbian smart phones in the next one or two years, is it appropriate to declare Symbian's death so early?

Since its release from last October, Windows Phone 7 devices did not become hot as expected in the market. Its sales in US market last quarter was only 2% of all the smart phones sold. I don't think WP7 market share will change much in year 2011, before Nokia releasing their WP7 devices. Nokia can definitely help WP7 to increase market share because of Nokia's brand name and strong distribution network. But to what percentage is unknown. I agree that Nokia has a better chance to win with WP7 than to use Meego in the near future. Meego's development is too slow. But if winning chance in the near future is the major criteria, then why doesn't Nokia choose Android?

Gartner's comment on Infor ERP Ln

2011-01-22T11:51:00.003+08:00

Recently I read the comment given by Gartner's analysts on ERP Ln in the annual magic quadrant report on ERP for SME manufacturing industries. For the report, click this link. You can compare this report with the one published 2 years ago.

The analysts gave the major reason to put ERP Ln in the niche player quadrant, "Its broad and deep functionality creates high complexity and costly implementation, and it has proved difficult to get a sufficient supply of skilled consultants or implementation partners. The large number of ERP solutions in Infor's portfolio and its financial situation will make it difficult to dedicate the R&D resources that will be needed to fundamentally modernize LN and to execute a next-generation vision."

The major drawback the analysts criticized was still the lack of useful standard reports and the difficulty to convert report output to other format, like Excel.

I agree with these points except the first one. ERP Ln's implementation does not need to be costly and complex. Actually all the implementation we have done are far far away from costly. For complex, no. Ln's functionality is deep but you can use it simple. Ln is not as complex as SAP ERP. SAP is quite difficult to configure but ERP Ln is not. Besides, the powerful Baan Tools give customers a flexibility to customize it without altering the source code.

But it is true that lack of resellers and implementation partners is its major problem. I don't think this situation can be changed.

Related posts:

Gartner's new magic quadrant of ERP for midmarket

A look back on year 2010

2010-12-27T07:37:00.003+08:00

Another year end again. Time passes so fast.
This year's main focus of enterprise applications were SaaS, vertical consolidation and third party support.

SaaS business vendors continued to gain market share and attention.In Hong Kong, I also saw some customers begin to transfer some departmental business function from on-premises solution to SaaS. SaaS will become a major trend for customers to reduce routine application administration cost and also the reliance on a single application vendor.

What I mean vertical consolidation here is referring the acquisition of Sybase by SAP, and the acquisition of Sun Micro by Oracle. With these acquisitions, SAP stepped into database market and Oracle stepped into hardware market. Oracle became an one-stop vendor. Customers can buy everything from Oracle, from hardware, database, middleware to business applications. What Oracle can purchase next? Probably a consulting company like Andersen Consulting, who knows? Can IT giants like IBM and HP sit there still and watch Oracle to eat their cheese? Considering what IBM and HP lack is a portfolio of business applications, it won't be a surprise in next year to hear that IBM or HP acquire SAP. SAP is the best fit for IBM or HP. But if SAP, a company with 60 billion US dollar market capitalization, is too big to swallow, Infor may be an alternative, an alternative which is better than doing nothing.

Last year I was surprised to see the rapid growth of Rimini Street, which showed there were many unsatisfied Oracle customers who wanted to escape from the lock-in of the vendor. But the trial result of TomorrowNow case certainly indicated third party support is not the solution of vendor lock-in. The major question is how third party support can obtain the knowledge to support an application which is not owned by them. A high profile third party support like TomorrowNow or Rimini Street certainly cannot be an implementation partner of the application vendors whom they compete. They have no way to train up their support staff to catch up the changes in new versions, and to fix a bug without changing the vendor's source code. To reduce vendor lock-in, my previous suggestion still worth a look.

Related Posts:

Practical actions to avoid lock-in

Nobel Peace Prize 2010

2010-12-11T16:04:00.000+08:00

Freedom of speech, so difficult in China.

Larry asks for 4 billion from SAP, is it too much?

2010-11-10T08:05:00.000+08:00

News: Oracle CEO Ellison Demands $4 Billion In Damages From SAP

We know that SAP customers have spent 2 trillion US dollars on SAP systems in the past two decades. In average, each SAP customer spent 100 million US dollars. For all those 380 Oracles customers SAP stole from Oracle, the potential income to SAP ecosystem on these customers is 38 billion US dollars. Now Larry Ellison only asks for one tenth of it. Larry, you should ask for more.

SAP Business ByDesign GA finally

2010-08-03T07:11:00.001+08:00

SAP AG finally make its SaaS application BBD general available to customers in countries including China, India, US, UK, France and Germany. The monthly subscription fee for its ERP package is US$149 per user per month. SAP AG offers three starter packages with fixed implementation charge. It is hard to say whether the implementation charge is expensive or not, as SAP AG did not disclose the details of the offering in the news.

An interesting question is whether SAP BBD will help the adoption of SaaS applications among corporate customers. It seems up to this moment, SaaS business applications are still not their major choices.

We know that Oracle Inc. has no interest to offer a SaaS version of its business application suite. Therefore, considering the strong ecosystem around SAP products, BBD has no serious competitors in the global market. The only thing it needs to prove to the market is BBD can really delivers a lower cost alternative to the tradition on-premise applications.