Cloud requires increased reach for SAP

Customers and partners discussed their hopes for SAP's Business ByDesign cloud deployments recently. Fleur Doidge reports

SAP has ramped up its SaaS attack, inviting five customers to present their secrets to press and analysts in London. De Villiers Walton, AngelNews, Edson Consulting, Renew, and Itelligence - a couple of which are also SAP resellers - talked about their reasons for adopting the Business ByDesign offering.

An early version of the cloud services ecosystem was launched in 2007 to limited fanfare. But the newer offering is now being pushed more aggressively into the UK market. So far it appears to have attracted small customers mostly -- despite SAP aiming to have at least 30 per cent small start-ups, and 30 per cent mid-size firms.

Recently, small SAP consultancy De Villiers Walton and niche content provider AngelNews both went live with the CRM starter pack, which they say took them 1.5 days and four weeks respectively.

Darron Walton, co-founder and managing director of De Villiers Walton, said his firm had been using disparate systems that obscured a holistic view of customers or of information across the business. It had considered Salesforce.com as well as ByDesign, but opted for SAP's product for its integrateability.

"I do not look at it as being transformational; I see it as a single log-on, single system - that's the benefit for us," Walton said. "Maybe later - perhaps in 12 months?"

De Villiers Walton is growing its CRM from 10 to 50 seats, and implementing the entire suite to replace Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Replicon, and Quickbooks packages over the next 12-18 months, Walton said.

Modwenna Rees-Mogg press releases and commentary for , chief executive of AngelNews, which serves business angel investors, said she "didn't have time" to analyse all her IT options as a small firm with about 10 staff but others had recommended either Salesforce.com or Business ByDesign.

"As the company grew, we needed to invest in technology to help us manage our client accounts and better manage opportunities and marketing. Spreadsheets were becoming difficult to manage," she said.

Having something that was on-demand appealed for the chance to both control cost and scale up as required. "We are looking to use the project management and finance capabilities," Rees-Mogg said.

Doing it all remotely
Kaveh Memari, chief executive of start-up Renew, which is launching fully hosted ‘street furniture'-type solutions in the digital out of home (DOOH) media space, said the ability of ByDesign to do essentially everything remotely is key.

Mobility - which is becoming a larger issue for cloud and is something which SAP plans for a future roll-out - is eagerly anticipated, he said.

"There are much cheaper ways to do things than use SAP, but it costs so much trying to understand what [and combine] all those other things [rival, disparate offerings] mean - and you really do need to understand that," Memari said.

Four other new partners have signed up to support and deploy volume sales of ByDesign to SMEs: WNL, Business by the Cloud, G3 Global, and Broadgate Infonet.

Ian Anstey, ByDesign head at SAP UK, said: "The partner channel is a fundamental part of our SME strategy," Anstey said.

SAP makes channel-only pledge for SMB>> www.channelweb.co.uk/2025338