Burning Question: Is SAP walking a mile in customer shoes?

So, at Sapphire SAP presented reasons for delay around its BBD SaaS offering. Most explanations centered around SAP "learning and optimizing what our customers have been doing" with hosting, applying SAP fixes, Basis support, upgrades, user support - various aspects of application management.And SAP automating many of these expensive, manual tasks. 

Privately, some SAP employees have told me the BBD journey has been a revelation how much its SI and outsourcing partners charge its clients, and now SAP is driven not just to improve economics for future SaaS customers but also for existing on-premise customers.

To which I go - Yeah! Why has it taken so long?

Then the other part of me goes - in bits and pieces SAP has offered services like this for years. Its consulting, systems integration, help desk and outsourcing groups know the effort and economics around SAP implementations and support and those in its large services ecosystem.

What do readers think? Has SAP embraced a new religion or is it just spin to explain away BBD delays?

Comments

[Paul Wallis]

Vinnie,

I wonder if they are having trouble with the user interface?

Last November in a post called “Enterprise Applications and User Interfaces”, I wrote that:

“There are changes afoot in the way enterprise applications are sold. Enterprise applications get so ingrained within a business that changing to a competitor is a very unpalatable proposition. So in order to find new markets enterprise software vendors are seeing that by changing their message slightly and using newer technologies, they can move away from the big, clumsy monolithic applications of old and start appealing to Small and Medium size businesses – essential if they are to expand their client base. New business from new market sectors.

This forces a change in price point. And that changes the sale more towards the high volume, low cost software application sector. And that forces a change in user interface. The most high profile changes we’ve seen have come with SAP and Oracle. ”

For more visit, http://www.keystonesandrivets.com/kar/2007/11/enterprise-appl.html

It may be that that the time and cost of making SAP more user-friendly and flexible is making them think again about the whole project.

[Scott]

My take: SAP are trying to shift the attention to implementation cost, which is largely driven by SIs. This is to deflect objections when customers realize what is entailed in complying with RunSAP and the mandated Enterprise Support for net new installs (@22%, not 17%).

[Jijesh Devan]

I heard from friends working on the architecture of BBD at SAP that they are having issues moving to a true first-degree multi-tenancy model where both schema and database will be shared.
I think this is the only way they can provide, the promised, 10x reduction in TCO.