Wookey Announces SAP's New SaaS Strategy... for Large Enterprises Only!

Today, SAP's EVP of Large Enterprise SaaS, John Wookey, (formerly of Oracle) announced the company's new SaaS strategy for the large enterprise. This is opposed to SAP's much maligned Business ByDesign SaaS solution that has been relegated to the SME (small and medium sized enterprise) "box" by SAP... even if this was a rather artificial target in my view...

For the large enterprise, Wookey announced that SAP would begin offering SaaS solutions, by functional area, as off-shoots of the on-premise products. (Sounds a lot like Microsoft's Software+Services, huh?) The first set of solutions will be focused around CRM, e-sourcing and carbon emissions management; which are all already available, but will be rearchitected to be multi-tenant. Additionally, it seems that there will be a big push in offering these SaaS extensions as mobile applications as well, leveraging SAP's very recent acquisition of SkyData Systems, and the the platform of its Frictionless acquisition as the new SaaS platform overall, which itself brought the SAP e-sourcing solution.

What is unclear in my mind thus far is... what is the purpose of this co-exisiting between SaaS and On-Premise? Will it be a new way for SAP to deliver new and specific functionality more quickly to all customers? By extending functionality, will it only be to offer the same modular applications in a SaaS environment, like is the case with SAP CRM? If the strategy is to do more of the latter, the release of SAP CRM On-Demand, (which was artificially relegated to the large enterprise "box," when actually it is most interesting for SME's) was an utter disaster... Then SAP went ahead and got it backwards again by offering core ERP on a SaaS platform to the lower end of SME, when it is clearly most interesting for the mid- to upper-mid-market. But why label every single product for a segment? It may help for internal hierarchy but it doesn't mean a thing to the customer!

If we consider the other path, and that the new SaaS platform will focus on extensions to SAP's core application modules, then this puts into question whether Netweaver is the platform going forward to extend and develop new applications from within the suite, when at the same time a SaaS solution covering a niche area can be quickly added and integrated (as they say) through this new SaaS platform... so which one is it? I guess both!

Finally, will this new SaaS platform based on Frictionless be available to partners and customers to develop on? In my mind, this is pretty crucial, since without much interaction with the ecosystem (especially IT services companies), this is DOA.

It's nice to hear that SAP is putting together a concrete SaaS strategy; it is just my hope that SAP will not try to keep this "new thing" called SaaS in a box where they feel it should belong ("just for SME"; "just for LE"; "just for niche extensions"; "just for us to develop")... part of the true value of SaaS solutions are their openess, the ability for the ecosystem to take solutions further than one company every could and the ability for all companies, large and small, to find their own value in leveraging this new architecture!