Cloud, Customers and Capabilities – The case for SAP Business One Cloud

Over time I moved from the SX-64 to a Commodore Amiga and then to my first 8086 based PC and on from there.

A lot has changed in the IT industry since I first purchased a computer but there are some key drivers that are the same relating to what businesses (particularly SME’s) want from their IT purchases. Even though the buzz words change over time, the fundamentals dont…..

In 1998, I was working at Great Plains Software and I was representing Great Plains as a member of what was then called the ASP Industry Consortium (Application Service Provider)…the very first industry group focused on the OnDemand delivery of applications over the Internet and comprised of industry pioneers in this space such as Citrix, Microsoft and a slew of equipment and infra-structure players such as Lucent, Corio, Cisco and others.

The holy grail in those days was focused initially on developing new “pay as you consume” license models which were even more of a challenge for incumbent software vendors then than they are now and many opted to construct finance offerings that gave the perception of a per user per month license payment model but at the end of the day….most people really got it that it was about financing by another name.

Back then we could deliver applications over the internet thanks to the early implementation of the RDP and ICA protocols from Citrix and Microsoft and early adopters grabbed hold of this deployment methodology as a way of getting the applications they wanted to run at a price they could afford without the big up front investments in infrastructure…..sound familiar?

Of course – it’s the same thinking that drives people to todays cloud offerings whether from Salesforce.com, SAP or Microsoft and interestingly having been involved in these models since 1998, the thing that sticks for me is that at the end of the day the customer is still focused on one thing and one thing only.

Give me an application that delivers the functionality I need to run my business effectively at a price I can afford, in a way that I can easily consume without having to become a computer expert in the process.

Those of us in the software industry and associated influencers, analysts and architects then get tied up in knots around the details of what is involved in doing this but at the end of the day, it always comes back to this key point.

When we launched SAP Business One OnDemand at CeBIT 2012, there was quite a bit of conjecture and discussion around whether or not the solution supported multi-tenancy and whether or not the architecture was single tenant, multi-tenant or whatever name the vendor chose to give it.

For a good sample of this here’s two posts from Dennis Howlett and Jon Reed that specifically dove in to this discussion along with a contribution from yours truly on exactly how we at SAP are delivering this multi-tenancy with SAP Business One and our Lifecycle Management Tools and architectural changes known collectively as the Cloud Control Center for SAP Business One.

 

Jon Reed on Google+ – https://plus.google.com/108599728945908192751/posts/QaW7M9x3ZGJ

Dennis Howlett on AccMan Pro – http://www.accmanpro.com/2012/03/13/why-the-sap-businessone-multi-tenancy-discussion-matters

Multi-Tenancy Deployments with SAP Business One OnDemand

I figured that now that we are 15 months on from that original announcement of SAP Business One OnDemand and that another SapphireNOW has come and gone with its raft of additional announcements and product re-naming’s, including SAP Business One OnDemand which is now called SAP Business One Cloud and sits under the Money group of SAP Cloud Apps from a branding perspective, it would be a good time to revisit the discussion and put a stake in the ground to give some view of the progress we have made with the solution.

Of course the primary indication people look to is how many customers have purchased the solution and I am pleased to say that we have sold more than 10,000 user licenses of SAP Business One OnDemand in a number of deployments and the amazing thing is that we are seeing many different models coming in to play with the customers that are purchasing – not just the traditional 3, 5 10 user deployments.

Many of the biggest investments from customers have come from large enterprise organizations that would prefer to keep their names out of the discussion as they are early in their deployment cycles but to give you an example of the industries and scenarios we are seeing, heres a few and interestingly we are getting a real mix of public cloud and private cloud deployments….all of which are facilitated by the “cloud-ability” of the solution (can I say that?)

 

Banking: Providing SAP Business One in an OnDemand model to customers as part of a full service package of financial services and software tailored specifically to the needs of SME’s together with pre-built integration to the banks financial transaction systems.

 

Retail: Providing SAP Business One OnDemand to downstream suppliers and manufacturers of product to enable better visibility of the supply chain with integration to the Large Enterprise Business Suite deployment for forecasting, master data management and vendor efficiency analysis.

 

Telecommunications: Providing SAP Business One OnDemand as part of an integrated package of applications, data, devices and deployment services to allow SME’s to get access to state of the art applications and devices with everything on a single bill from a single provider.

 

So whilst you probably heard SAP Business One mentioned briefly by Bill McDermott, Vishal Sikka, Jim Snabe and Hasso Plattner at Sapphire NOW in their respective keynotes, you probably didn’t here a lot of detailed shouting from the rafters about SAP Business One and how we are quietly plugging away in the background delivering on SAP’s On Premise, OnDevice, OnDemand product strategy.

You’ll probably be happy to know (especially if you are an existing customer) that the solution continues to grow in leaps and bounds ….and a lot of this is due to the team we have at SAP Labs in China who are really delivering on the product roadmap faster and at higher quality then ever before and the great and positive feedback we are getting from our customers that contributes to the development as well.

Speaking of roadmaps, here’s the latest roadmap for SAP Business One as well in a video presentation in case you didn’t get a chance to catch it in my original post.

If you have been reading this and are now thinking, wow, I didn’t know SAP Business One could do all these things, here’s an overview presentation I have put together as well that you can take a look at.

And if that’s not enough and you are still having difficulty wrapping your head around exactly what the solution is and what it does, here’s a link to 6 hours of complete end to end demonstrations of the different components for you.

http://www.richardduffy.com/sap-business-one

In my next post I will show you exactly how we deliver SAP Business One Cloud , the components of the architecture and why SAP Partners are succeeding with this by noting exactly what Jon Reed pointed out in his post ….”customers don’t care – at least not about the technical guts of this”

 

Cheers

 

Richard Duffy

SAP Business One Product Evangelist and SAP Mentor