Preview of SAP Business ByDesign
SAP last September announced the early adopter roll-out of SAP Business ByDesign. Business ByDesign is SAP’s entry in the On Demand Business Applications space and is being marketed to SMB customers with 25 to 500 users.
Business ByDesign will allow SAP to cover the entire gamut of customers sizes and will complement SAP Business Suite, SAP Business All-in-One and SAP Business One.
Business ByDesign will be priced at $149 per month per user with a minimum of 25 licensed users. The monthly subscription pricing is all inclusive and includes infrastructure, product support service and upgrades.
Business process functionality includes financials, CRM, executive management support, financials, human capital management, project management, supplier relationship management, supply chain management, compliance management and integration with Microsoft Office.
Business ByDesign runs Netweaver; a smart move in that SAP partners and customers can access all the SAP Enterprise Repository. Netweaver will also allow SAP partners to extend Business ByDesign by developing vertical industry applications utilizing SOA and technologies such as IBM WebSphere, Java EE and Microsoft.Net.
Just like SAP Business All In One and SAP Business One; Business ByDesign utilizes T-Rex and Max DB, thus eliminating dependence on SQL server, Oracle or DB2 databases.
Business ByDesign is a pure On Demand solution; but is not multi-tenant, unlike Netsuite, Salesforce or the smaller On Demand ERP competitors. Also the early versions on Business ByDesign are a bit short on Enterprise 2.0 features such as Mash-Up support and Web 2.0 User Interface features.
Business ByDesign is expected to have general availability in the first half of 2008 and SAP estimates 1000 customers will be live by mid 2009.
Update 8 May 2008 – Since I posted this review of Business ByDesign there have been a number of announcements relating to the availability date of the product…..
