Ray Wang and I were recruited to judge a “shootout” at the Sapience conference Helmuth Guembel had organized in Cambridge this week.
Mark Siller, Project Manager Steinbeis-Transferzentrum demoed the OneWorld product along with Mini Peiris, VP of Product Marketing at Netsuite. Carsten Brockmann, Chair of Business Information Systems and Electronic Government, University of Potsdam demoed on a test version of BusinessByDesign.
Mark and Carsten walked the audience through various financial, CRM and manufacturing processes. Ray, Helmuth and I scored the products on the functionality as demonstrated and on a variety of look and feel, usability and technical factors.
Our composites showed NetSuite scored 7.58 and SAP scored 6.34 on a scale of 1= low, and 10= high.
Dennis Howlett captured our summary evaluation comments in this video. Helmuth plans to provide more detailed clips soon.
Some “apples to oranges” comments are appropriate. SAP will be releasing version 2.5 of BusinessByDesign next year. So far, it has had a controlled early release it has been supporting about 100 customers on. NetSuite, on the other hand, was demoed on a production system which supports 6,000 or so customers.
Also, SAP did not have a marketing rep help on the demo. Not that we expected to given the perception this was an “anti-SAP” conference. But if they had, we may have seen a better – or at least less choppy - demo. In reverse, we did not factor economics – SAP plans to list at $ 149 a user a month, with a minimum of 25 users. NetSuite has various plans which list at $ 99 per user a month, some with a minimum of 2 users.
NetSuite can feel very good about itself. They have pioneered the SaaS market and toiled for over a decade and it shows in the richness and robustness we saw.
I look forward to judging a fuller, more robust BusinessByDesign in the months to come –with SAP’s active participation. I hope they accept that for the next few years, ByD will be an underdog and catching up to a decade’s lead pioneers like NetSuite and salesforce.com have. It needs all the publicity – good and bad - it can get.
