SAP Business ByDesign Senior Director, Jim Daddario

Key take away points in the SAP Business ByDesign discussion with Thought Leader Jim Daddario:

• The Business ByDesign customer target market is identified along three dimensions—the small to midsize enterprise (SME) market generally defined as 50 to 250 employees, by geography where ByDesign is currently supported in 11 countries with 6 additional countries, and for subsidiaries of larger enterprises seeking a Tier 2 ERP strategy. This last market segment is particularly applicable to existing SAP customers running Business Suite, but wanting an easier to consume ERP and CRM application for smaller subsidiaries, remote locations or decentralized lines of business.
• ByDesign also offers vertical market solutions in professional services, wholesale distribution and manufacturing. An overarching strength of this application is its support for business processes that cross departmental boundaries, however, the enterprise-wide application can also be deployed in phases with starter packages in areas such as finance and customer relationship management.
• SAP's vision for Business ByDesign is not unlike Business Suite or what made SAP a marquee brand in the early 90's—and that is to replace multiple best of breed business applications (and the system integration and maintenance that accompany such an approach) with a fully-integrated, enterprise-wide application built on a common data model and framework. Instead, SAP seeks to replicate to the cloud a business software strategy proven effective over the last two decades in the on-premise ERP software market.
• SAP believes that the product's top competitive advantage is that it is a cloud-based business software suite built to support end to end business processes, rather than line of business transactions performed in isolated applications. For example, in the lead to cash cycle, business process support may exceed standalone SFA or CRM applications when sales people need access to inventory or services availability. Granting the sales professional access from SFA to supply chain data or resource services availability enables him to commit delivery by precise dates in order to close the sale. Similarly, sales pros using the CRM can access product catalogues to create quotes, and then convert those quotes into sale orders for fulfillment and continued flow to the accounting application.
• The mobility empowers sales people in the field to access customer information, update their pipelines, view inventory availability and enter orders among other tasks. Further, by granting remote staff access to sales data as well as back-office data (such as credit utilization, outstanding orders, open invoices, etc.) the employee is able to achieve the oft quoted but seldom realized 360 degree customer view.
• The current Business By Design go to market execution is a two-fold strategy of ramping up additional sales staff organized by geography and industry, and fostering a partner channel and ecosystem. SAP is advancing and promoting its SDK (software development kit) to encourage business partners to extend the application software into vertical markets or fill white space. The SAP Store is an online marketplace for customers to review and purchase add-on solutions from both partners and SAP.
• The application is currently only available as a public cloud, SaaS solution. However, the company suggests that customer choice in deployment, or more particularly, on-premise or private cloud deployment, is part of the product road map. Similar to the SAP Sales OnDemand and other Line of Business applications, there is a longer-term vision to also support hybrid deployments, whereby customers may deploy business applications in both private and public clouds working in conjunction. This deployment strategy also parallels the company's expanding two tier strategy whereby SAP customers run Business Suite on-premise, but deploy Business ByDesign in the cloud for subsidiaries.
• SAP's 2 tier strategy offers two separate product approaches. Business ByDesign is positioned for enterprise subsidiaries seeking enterprise-wide applications for end to end process support. Alternatively, the Line of Business applications, such as Sales OnDemand, are positioned for enterprise companies seeking tier 2 departmental applications.