The Silver Lining from SAP BBD delay?

Several of the Enterprise Irregulars are spending time with SAP executives at Sapphire. The issue of delays around Business ByDesign (BBD) came up in separate meetings this morning with co-CEOs Dr. Henning Kagermann and Leo Apotheker.

They clarified several items. The slowdown in BBD investment is more around the global rollout, not in the R&D. The initial deployments showed unique customer configuration and other issues they had not anticipated in the labs. Those drove the need to automate more of the application management and upgrade processes - which in turn has fed enhancements to NetWeaver. In turn, it made sense to have BBD rollout slow down to leverage these NetWeaver enhancements.

While the delays buy its SaaS competitors more time, I am excited about this increased automation of manual processes that its current, on-premise users can leverage.

For a while now, I have advised my SAP clients to seek SaaS pricing around application hosting, management and support by making their outsourcers propose SacS economics. If SAP can automate and cannibalize more of the labor intensive tasks, that should make SaCS economics even more attractive. 

SAP reiterated BBD pricing would not change much from the $ 150 a user a month previously announced. Both Henning and Leo reiterated the 10X reduction in TCO.

Of course, you can hear the excuses lining up from the SAP ecosystem - wait till BBD is mature, it will not scale beyond the current small BBD user footprint. 

OK, may be not 10X reduction - even a 3-4X reduction in on-premise TCO would be delightful to the current customer base.