SAP Business ByDesign 3.0 - Beyond the Headlines

Amidst the hype festival surrounding the SAP HANA General Availability (GA) announcement in June and the waiting game around SAP BusinessObjects 4.0, the latest release of Business ByDesign (Feature Pack 3.0) came and went on August 4 without much fanfare. But there was a news story around ByD 3.0 after all, as well as some interesting new features.

The whole point of a SaaS-like release schedule is that feature packs are more iterative and closely tied to customer requirements. That may take away from the blogging frenzy over a long-awaited release like BI 4.0, but there’s no doubt that more frequent releases reinforce customer value and confidence. ByDesign currently stands out amongst SAP products as the software SAP has been able to consistently release on time (or darn near on time) with each iteration. Every six months, a new ByD release comes out, raising the bar for the significantly slower Business Suite related products. Hopefully I’m not the only one to see a news story there.

In terms of the ByDesign 3.0 release, there were some headlines and some subtler points that didn’t get much attention.

First, the headlines:

1. The ByDesign “SAP Store” is now open, accessible to customers, partners, and anyone else willing to go through a (free) registration process. The ultimate success of the ByDesign depends upon the proliferation of add-on apps and industry solutions. The ByDesign apps store is a step towards that goal. (Aside: yes, SAP now several online stores and has told me they intend to simplify the online storefront approach).

2. ByD 3.0 includes enhanced functionality for subsidiaries of SAP Business Suite customers in the form of “packaged integration scenarios.” It has not always been clear how important SAP felt the subsidiaries play was to ByDesign, but it’s now obvious that SAP is going to feature this aspect heavily as part of its “two tier ERP strategy.” (Though it should be noted that SAP Business One is also pitched as part of a two tier ERP strategy also, setting up yet another juxtaposition between SAP’s cloud and on-premise SME products that could create some market confusion). I recently conducted an SAP Community Network podcast with Clause Gruenewald, who went into some detail on SAP’s plans for ByDesign and subsidiaries.

3. An “Ideas Forum” is live for customers and partners to submit (and vote on) product improvements via a Community Platform. I believe this forum should eventually be expanded beyond customers and partners in some fashion. For some reason SAP is using a third party ideation service (ideascale.com) rather than its own Idea Place for this feature. SAP has a long way to go with ByDesign community building in general. I’ll reserve judgment on the ideas forum until I talk with customers and partners who have used it.

4. Last but not least for the countries involved, ByDesign is now available in Mexico and Australia as of ByD 3.0. ByD 3.0 also features what SAP calls an “New User Interface Design” for more flexibility in customizing the corporate look of the screens (I hope to kick tires on the latest UI look at SAP TechEd Las Vegas). Functionality enhancements spanned all the ByD components, including third party order processing (Manufacturing) and Professional Services Provider capabilities like profitability and revenue recognition, which was a much-needed function not present in 2.6 (the next release of ByDesign, 3.5, is the edition where the Professional Services capabilities will be totally fleshed out and put under the analyst microscope).

5. The ByDesign Studio was also enhanced to enable partners to develop customer-specific and industry-specific add-ons. The SDK is still limited to a select group of ByDesign Solution Partners, leading to many questions about its capabilities (though SAP has provided hands-on sessions with the SDK at SAP TechEd and will do so again at this years’ TechEd events). To get a clearer view of the ByD SDK, I conducted a video interview with Vijayan Venkataraman of ERP Logic, who has worked on the SDK since 2008 when he was employed by SAP Labs. Vijayan’s insights into the ByD SDK were interesting, confirming the lack of need for ABAP and the current ability to use the SDK to build “one off solutions” for specific customer requirements:



A few other less-reported points to note about ByDesign and 3.0:

1. SAP continues to work on performance (system speed) for ByDesign. New customers in the U.S. are added to a U.S.-based data center, and it’s my understanding existing North American customers also have migration options to move to that data center.

2. The extent of the partners’ ability to configure ByDesign is something to watch. Some partners have told me they would like to be able to more deeply configure the product than is currently allowed. SAP should have more to say on this in the future.

3. Just because ByD 3.0 is out doesn’t mean all existing ByDesign customers immediately move to 3.0. 2.6 customers will be moved in “waves,” while customers prior to 2.6 may need to move to 2.6 first and then to 3.0. I expect these migrations to new versions of ByDesign to be smoother with upcoming releases as SAP’s multi-tenant architecture is in a much more finalized state than it was for the earlier ByDesign customers.

4. On August 23rd, SAP released the SAP Business ByDesign iPhone App version 3.0 (it is also called the ByDesign Player). According to Leonardo De Araujo of Beyond Technologies, a Canadian ByDesign partner, the Player is written in mobile device specific language (as of now, iOS for Iphone/Ipad). This player connects to SAP ByDesign backend system, reads the user profile/role and displays all the transactions that are mobile-ready in “workcenters” (logical groupings of transactions). De Araujo says that the mobile workcenters are similar in look and feel to the ByDesign desktop version.

The Player follows the UI approach by workcenters on the Netweaver Business client, available on the latest SAP Business All-in-One release. That’s a major plus as this is SAP’s best UI. The player then renders the transaction in mobile format, respecting the mobile capabilities and look and feel. The "ByD Player" will soon be available for BlackBerry and Androids as well. As De Araujo puts it, "The good thing about the player is that this makes the development of mobile apps completely transparent. Partners like us code in the ByD Studio, and the transaction will render correctly in any mobile device supported by the player."

Business ByDesign has a long way to go to build that thriving developer ecosystem and seamless apps store experience, but 3.0 is yet another overlooked milestone in a release that may not be moving rapid fire by SaaS standards, but is certainly setting an internal standard for other SAP products to measure their release schedules against.