Here I go, showing my age and musical preferences again but both Van Halen and Midnight Oil have written and recorded songs with the title of “The Best of Both Worlds” and even if I do say so, both are great rockers to get the blood racing and good for a morning pick me up with your first or second espresso of the day…start with Van Halen, then move on to Midnight Oil to up the tempo!

The album cover of Van Halen's 1986 release, 5150

But what has this got to do with ERP software and SAP Business One in particular?

Well,  they make a good point in that they both talk about our need to have the best that the world has on offer and thats certainly one of the driving principles behind our strategy with SAP Business One is about  providing our customers with choice and flexibility in how they purchase and deploy our software.

Now if you are a cloud purist, I am sure you’ll be loading up your cannons to give me a blast with all the reasons why you beleive traditional on premise software models are dinosaurs and they are a thing of the past but I have to say that as Thomas Wailgum points out in his recent bloig post on the ASUG web site titled The Death of ERP! Long Live ERP!,  according to Panorama Consulting’s recent 2102 ERP resarch, customers are still choosing the traditional deployment model 58 percent of the time with 21 percent rolling out traditional ERP hosted off-site and 16% choosing to go down the SaaS (Software as a Service) pathway.

So it makes sense to offer customers a choice that allows them to decide on the model that best fits their needs at the moment with a clear pathway to the other options at any time and thats what we are doing.

At the upcoming Cebit, customers and partners will have the opportunity to learn more about SAP’s strategy with SAP Business One via a partner only OnDemand model for small businesses and our development teams have already built and are rolling out tools and engines to support multi-tenant cloud deployments of Business One.

That will complete our offerings for small businesses – you can have a solution deployed on premise purchased under a perpetual license, hosted wherever you choose under the same perpetual license model, deployed under a hosting model with our Subscription based Hosting option or completely OnDemand with browser based access and zero footprint deployment.

As as Sammy Hagar and Van Halen sing on their 5150 album – “I want the best of both worlds -Honey,  I know what its worth” – and we believe our small business customers do as well.

Van Halen – 5150 Album Artwork and Lyrics copyright Warner Bros. Records Inc.