SAP Business ByDesign current and prospective customers can all breathe a sigh of relief — the cloud-based business suite isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, it’s about to get a lot better thanks to SAP’s commitment to revamp the technology platform of the nearly 10-year-old product.
An article on the iTnews website outlines how disgruntled employees rattled the cages of Business ByDesign customers around the world recently by leaking SAP’s plan to move some of its development resources away from current feature development.
Until recently, SAP executives weren’t able to respond to the damaging information. But now, they’re providing the whole story and showing how the company will improve Business ByDesign by focusing on refactoring the product on the new HANA-based cloud platform over the next 12 to 18 months.
This article does a good job of highlighting why SAP is moving in the direction that it is and the benefits of doing so. There’s a lot of misinformation in the market about Business ByDesign not being successful and SAP “sunsetting” the product. But that’s simply not true — nor is it logical.
Why would SAP invest 18 months of development in re-architecting a product that it’s going to sunset? SAP wouldn’t make that type of financial investment in a product unless it’s expecting a payoff in the future.
Business ByDesign is the go-to-market product for SAP in the mid-market ERP space. Re-architecting the product using the HANA platform is going to improve Business ByDesign on several levels. The in-memory database technology will result in unprecedented performance as well as real-time analytics of all elements of the application. The HANA development platform will dramatically reduce development time.
Remember that SAP started architecting Business ByDesign in 2004; today, there’s a whole different set of technologies and computing economies available. Businesses should feel good about a company that’s willing to re-architect a product to take advantage of newer technologies and economies, rather than sitting on a sunken investment in a product. This is in stark contrast to several ERP products on the market today that continue to use antiquated technology.
The bottom line is that SAP is making a long-term investment in Business ByDesign, and that’s a positive sign for companies using or considering an investment in this product. SAP is a financially strong company willing to make appropriate short-term decisions for the sake of positive long-term outcomes.
Source: iTnews, November 2013
