SAP's "new friends"

When you "validate a market and then vacate it" - Phil Wainewight's words for SAP's delay around BusinessByDesign - you end up with some interesting "friends" in the vacuum

At Dreamforce last week, Marc Benioff of salesforce.com invited SAP to join Coda and others and dump its internal development and start using his Force platform.

Zach Nelson CEO of NetSuite, in turn says "We expect (SAP) are eager to help their customers reduce costs during this difficult economy...One sure way they could significantly lower the overall total cost of ownership for SAP R/3 customers would be to embrace NetSuite as a complementary, division-level solution within their installed base."

In the meantime, the poor product is actually starting to look good - see Dennis' recent analysis  - but is getting only lukewarm internal support from SAP. As David Terrar reported last month from the SAP TechEd event in Berlin:

"In this year’s keynote BusinessByDesign appeared on one architectural slide diagram at the end of Leo’s pitch, but wasn’t even mentioned in the words. In a subsequent press and blogger conference, when asked about the product, Leo gave a primarily political sounding answer saying as little as possible and referring the questioner to announcements earlier in the year, and that there was no change. If I was a Business ByDesign customer or partner, I would be pretty worried by the lack of comment in the current strategy vision or compared to previous events. "

As they say with friends like this, who needs enemies?