Jeff Stiles is back to give us an update on the SME product portfolio, and there’s an interesting tie-in to yesterday’s message at the Business Objects day: the portfolio includes both business management and business intelligence, with a pretty strong emphasis on how BI adds value to SAP’s traditional business management.
He went through the entire SME portfolio:
- Business One, their small business on-premise solution, sold only through channel partners.
- Business ByDesign, their new on-demand service that provides a single end-to-end business solution, targeted at fast-growing midsize companies that don’t want to built a large IT infrastructure, and typically have less than 100 users. There are a number of pre-configured processes built in, intended to support common business processes without requiring extensive customization. Business ByDesign is available only in US, UK, Germany, France, China and India; the restriction in geography for a SaaS solution seems to indicate that this still requires a significant amount of effort at the customer location in order to sell and service the customer.
- All-in One, for midsize companies that need a more customizable solution.
- Analytics with Business Objects.
As you can likely tell by the volume of notes, we spent most of the session with audience questions and comments on Business ByDesign. The sessions this morning have been pretty basic, and I’ve learned way more about SAP sales channels than I ever wanted to know; hopefully we’ll get more detailed product information as the day goes on.
There’s an online tool to help figure out which SME tool best fits the customer requirements, based on five factors: the way you do business, your budget and timelines, your IT expertise and perferences, the way that your employees work, and your future growth plans.