By Emily Jacobs
Executive board member Vishal Sikka has denied that SAP is stopping development of Business ByDesign, a cloud-based ERP product for small to mid-sized businesses.
German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche reported on Saturday that while existing customers could continue to use the ByDesign product, SAP would not continue investment into the product – a claim refuted by Sikka.
“ByDesign is continuing, yes,” he said.
“We are refactoring the product to run on HANA. We’ll move every customer to this refactored ByDesign when we have it.”
According to Sikka, a team will continue to support the current version and will run it in an ABAP server until the HANA transition is completed.
Business ByDesign was created in 2003 with the hope of expanding into the small and mid-sized business market. However, it was only launched in 2010 after a €3 billion investment and seven years of development.
So far, according to the Wirtschaftswoche article, it has only signed up 785 customers and is expected to generate €23 million euros in sales this year. However, Sikka said SAP continues to secure customers for ByDesign, “including some big ones”.
The magazine reported that the solution has been plagued by problems, with customers complaining about technical issues and the slowness of the software.
In an August interview, John Okunski, director, North America cloud channel sales at SAP told Accounting Technology that they were reevaluating Business ByDesign.
“While Business ByDesign has been a heavily adopted solution, as a high performing company, SAP is not satisfied that we have achieved maximum market impact and become the de facto standard for SMEs to use to run their businesses,” he said.
In a subsequent statement, SAP said Business ByDesign would be combined into the HANA Cloud solution and would “continue to be supported and actively promoted in its current scope”.
