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There have been many reports recently on the problems with SAP’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, Business ByDesign – see for example the article by Timothy Morgan here.

To summarize, SAP is backing off its initial, bullish claims on SAP Business ByDesign, saying that it is now going to proceed at a much slower pace than originally planned. Of course, the SAP trade show Sapphire, which is being held this week, might provide more info, but I somehow doubt it.

So, what is going on? Why the sudden backtrack? After great trumpeting 18 months ago from SAP about Business ByDesign being the magic bullet for SMEs, offering the ability to run remote copies of SAP applications on a per user basis without having to cough up for a full license, why the hesitation?

I suspect the truth of the matter may be partly political, partly execution oriented and partly financial. There are those who would argue that SAP does not really WANT a SaaS market for its packages to come rushing into existence. After all, from a supplier point of view wouldn’t you prefer to sell more expensive licenses that lock the user in rather than a cheap usage-based service that the user can walk away from at any time?  So the conspiracy theorists would say SAP deliberately tried to freeze the market for SAP SaaS offerings to discourage competition and slow down the emergence of this market.

On the execution side, perhaps it is possible that SAP did not realize that selling SaaS solutions is a world away from selling large application suites directly to big companies. SaaS solutions are low-cost high-volume as opposed to high-cost low-volume, and hence need much more efficient and layered distribution channels – and SMEs are used to picking up the phone to ask someone whenever they have to change something, not a great strength for SAP’s support structure.

Then finally, the financial side. Many SaaS suppliers have discovered an uncomfortable truth – while in a license model the user pays a substantial sum of money for purchase followed by maintenance, in a SaaS model the risk position is reversed, with the supplier having to put the resources in place up front to support the POTENTIAL usage of the infrastructure by all those signed up users and then receiving revenues in a slow trickle over time. Is it possible that SAP just didn’t like the financial implications of having to continually invest while looking at payback times of years? Did they therefore decide to deliberately throttle the number of new customers, giving them a chance to make some money before making more investments?

Maybe SAP will tell all at Sapphire … or maybe we will just have to keep guessing.

Steve