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Third Eye View, by Rajan Chandras
Rajan Chandras is a consultant with a global IT consulting, systems integration and outsourcing firm. Write him at rchandras@gmail.com. See More by Rajan Chandras
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SAP Pays Price for SaaS Maturation 
SAP CEO-in-waiting Leo Apotheker's recent comments on the company's SaaS ERP solution were very illuminating, and highlight one of the key challenges ahead for cloud computing vendors (and hence customers). SAP's Business ByDesign, the newly introduced SaaS version for ERP, is "ready and done" and "the coolest app ever written," according to Apotheker. Yet, he admits, it's a bad time, financially, for doing a big market push — "hurting our margin, and hurting our stock," is how he describes it. The implication is that the product is ready (in fact, version 2.0 of Business ByDesign is apparently waiting in the wings), but getting customers to sign up for it will be a bit of a challenge, and in these troubled financial times, it's probably better to spend conservatively rather than splurge on a big market push. Recent reports from Forrester Research seem to confirm this. In a report that came out this summer, Forrester lists three indications that SAP was putting the brakes on Business ByDesign:
Forrester sees SAP as well ahead in the game, rating it at level 3 on Forrester's SaaS Maturity Model. Forrester calls Level 3 "single app SaaS," described as follows: Apotheker's assertion is more apodictic than apocalyptic (and this allusive alliteration is atrociously artless). It is also ironical that a business solution that promises savings to customers is too expensive to roll out... for one of the software giants, no less. Nevertheless, this investment and maturity in SaaS positions SAP well for the future, and customers can look forward to getting a more mature product from a more mature vendor.
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