At the SAP SME Summit in New York City this week, SAP has announced that small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) will now be able to run the SAP Business One Cloud solution on the SAP HANA platform at data centres run by SAP.
SAP Business One Cloud was initially released in 2012, and Luis Murguia, senior vice president and general manager, SAP Business One, SAP SE, said the vendor “felt compelled” to offer partners the option to run SAP Business One in the cloud.
Partners now have three deployment options for the subscription-based offering of SAP Business One Cloud: to run in a partner’s private hosted cloud, in a cloud infrastructure hosted by a third party or in data centres run by SAP.
“This provides an end-to-end SAP-branded experience that is simple to use, is cost-effective, and leverages the capabilities of SAP HANA,” said Murguia.
Available first in North America, with expansion planned to Europe and Asia in 2016, SAP will provide deployment services to reduce upfront costs and minimal IT overhead for SMEs. The offering will include backup and restore, disaster recovery and platform maintenance.
SAP said there are now 50,000 customers of the SAP Business One application around the world. The web-based SAP Business One Cloud solution is suitable for small and growing companies requiring their first ERP software, as well as affiliates of large enterprises requiring the agility and flexibility to adapt to larger corporate structures.
SAP also unveiled the results of a survey of small and midsize businesses conducted by Knowledge@Wharton, which showed that 72 per cent of leaders and team members say business complexity has hurt efforts to meet process and decision making goals. However, only 49 per cent of senior leaders believe business simplification is of significant strategic importance today, though 65 per cent believe it will be strategically important within the next three years.
Though 47 per cent believe they will be using self-service tools when they are making decisions within the next three years, but only 19 per cent are currently using them.
“Business simplification is much more important to small and medium business than ever before,” said Rudolph Cardenuto, president, global partner operations, SAP. “The interconnected global economy has opened opportunities to small businesses that never existed before, but they come with new challenges as well. If these businesses think and plan from the beginning on how to run simple in the long run, they will grow faster and perform better.”
