For SAP Business One Partners – The steps that can help your business adapt to an OnDemand world

Adapting to an OnDemand world

Since we first announced our plans to deliver SAP Business One via a Software as a Service model where customers can pay per user per month and access the solution via the cloud a lot of the discussion has been focused on the technical aspects of the solution, the pricing model and working with hosting partners – all of which are important topics to cover, of course.
However, based on a number of discussions with analysts, some internal research, conversations with partners and by looking at the market for SaaS solutions and the type of customers that are investing in these solutions a couple of things are becoming apparent (at least I think they are) and I believe need to be raised as topics of discussion.
So this is my first post as an attempt to get those discussions rolling……
First and foremost, it’s clear that whilst we are starting to see a trend towards SaaS solutions delivered via the cloud, the requirement for OnPremise solutions is not going to go away overnight – despite what some of the SaaS only vendors would have you believe.
This is the main reason why we believe that it makes sense to offer SAP Business One in both delivery models.
Many of the customers that the analyst firms are interviewing and using as the basis for their statistics have stated quite clearly that they aren’t necessarily ready to purchase an OnDemand solution today but they want to ensure that they have options open to them in the future and that they consider that it is possible to start by utilising a hybrid approach to their adoption of these solutions – that is, to keep their business critical apps OnPremise and to take certain components of these in to the cloud –such as their business intelligence, team collaboration and productivity apps, sales force automation or mobile applications.
We already have Software Solution Partners (SSP’s) such as Coresystems offering these kind of solutions and SAP are also offering these as well with BI OnDemand, SAP StreamWork and the Mobile Application for SAP Business One just to name a few that are applicable in the SME space.
But the delay in the adoption of these solutions in many cases appears to come down to the readiness of partners to offer those options to their customers.
Take BI OnDemand as an example.
Business intelligence and analytics has been one of those areas where there has been quite a significant barrier to entry for small businesses despite the efforts of a number of vendors to tailor their offerings to that market.

Why?
Often it’s because the additional investments in hardware, software and the consulting fees involved in getting started for what many of those organisations see as a speculative investment are too high for them to be able to commit to.
Now, before anyone jumps on me for my use of the description “speculative investment” I make this statement based on significant personal experience of working with customers and partners and trying to help a number of vendors gain a foothold with their solutions in the small business market.
Many small businesses don’t truly understand the business value that a good analytics or decision support solution can bring until they have had a chance to see it in action and most of these solutions haven’t offered that option hence they see the investments as an “if you build it, they might come” proposition.
But BI OnDemand (which now runs on SAP HANA by the way) addresses this by providing a free version that customers can use with some restrictions around data set size and functionality and SAP Business One has a built in integration that will extract data from the database and push it to the cloud for BI OnDemand to consume on an as needed or scheduled basis.
It can then be accessed from their mobile devices as well as via a web browser as well as from inside SAP Business One via the cockpit browser widget.
They can then move to a per user per month model for a fully featured solution with those restrictions removed once they see how access to this information can help them.
Or of course they can then move to an OnPremise solution like Crystal Server that has the ability to publish to mobile devices via a private cloud or simple Intranet access model.
Yet, despite my urgings for partners to offer this as a preconfigured value add option and wrap it up with some chargeable pre-built content based on their knowledge of what their target market wants and needs I am yet to see anyone truly “industrialise” this option and start to take advantage of what I believe will be the fundamental shift that is coming with the SaaS evolution.
And that shift will be that customers will also want to start seeing the services component of their deployments move to a packaged and amortised model as well. This means that not only will the software and the hosting components become commoditised but there will be a mind shift from customers as well….in my opinion, it’s only a matter of time before customer will start asking the question – if I can pay per user per month for my software and sign a contract for 12 months, why can’t I do the same for some (if not all) of the associated services.
By the way, many of you know that I ran my own ERP partner company selling to small businesses for 13 years during the late 80’s and 90’s.
During that time toyed with the idea of “packaged services” with mixed success…of course SaaS was not even a gleam in Marc Benioff’s eye at that time but I had a client that offered software for lease and asset management – the only way their software was available was via a rental model which included the services and support…they were the market leader and ran a very healthy business.
If I had the option to offer my software at that time in that model as an alternative for those customers that wanted it, I would have, however all my vendors were not interested in taking a gamble with me so it never happened for me…in hindsight I believe that it would have helped manage many of the issues that eventually made me give up the business and join the “dark side”
I believe that the partners that can start to harness this approach together with the traditional OnPremise pay up front model will be the best positioned to win in this new environment.
So that’s my fundamental premise to get the conversation kicked off – what do you think?
Am I crazy or do you agree with some or all of my points – what’s your experience of this approach, have you tried it and if so, what was the result – I’d love to hear what you think.

Richard Duffy