Let's be straight, SAP Business ByDesign has had a well documented, bumpy start to its life for the past 4 years or so. But this was partially due to SAP's own cautious nature as a development company, aiming to get a relatively small number of customers up and running (and happy), while it continued to refine the solution and its own SaaS strategy.
Fast forward to 2011, and according to SAP executives at the annual Sapphire conference, the solution has just reached 500 customers, and they are aiming to get this number into "the thousands" by the end of 2011. After years of false starts, it seems that the solution is ready for the big leagues, with the release of an SDK for the ByDesign platform to partners earlier this year, and as a result, the first of many partner solutions to come, all showcased on SAP's own "app-store" ... the SAP Store.
Today at the event, a partner solution tailored for the Chemicals sub-vertical was unveiled by Accenture.... Accenture?!?! Yes, that's right. Which points to two major movements: First, while ByDesign will always target the SME market, it is clearly moving upmarket, just like R/3 did in the 90's. At first opportunistically, and for very specific areas, but growing with partner adoption into the large enterprise. And second, Accenture is clearly showing that while the bulk of their business has been focused in the large enterprise (especially the Fortune 200), the company is capable of, and actively targeting more scalable offerings to the upper mid-market. While this will clearly be a smaller focus for Accenture, as the SaaS-related portion of its SAP business grows along with SAP's own SaaS offerings, PAC expects to see more and more efficient and scalable offerings from the company, using its unique "cloud factory" approach.
Frankly, today's Sapphire announcements were a bit light, but tomorrow is expected to reveal much more about SAP's SaaS Lines of Business, as well as Mobility... stay tuned!
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