Requires Membership to View
To gain access to this and all member only content, please provide the following information:
By submitting your registration information to SearchITChannel.com you agree to receive email communications from the TechTarget network of sites, and/or third party content providers that have relationships with TechTarget, based on your topic interests and activity, including updates on new content, event notifications, new site launches and market research surveys. Please verify all information and selections above. You may unsubscribe at any time from one or more of the services you have selected by editing your profile, unsubscribing via email or by contacting us here
- Your use of SearchITChannel.com is governed by our Terms of Use
- We designed our Privacy Policy to provide you with important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. We encourage you to read the Privacy Policy, and to use it to help make informed decisions.
- If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.
 |
||||
|
|
|||
|
||||
Many say it's about time. SAP is definitely late to this SaaS party, having watched Salesforce.com blaze the trail for hosted CRM for years. And Microsoft has offered CRM in partner-hosted, on-premises and now even Microsoft-hosted iterations for some time as well. And, when SAP finally entered the fray with Business ByDesign two years ago, customers were underwhelmed and partners were irate because SAP at first appeared to cut them out of the equation. SAP also launched a SaaS CRM product four years ago but soon stopped talking about it.
"It's taken large companies like SAP a long time to figure out how they can avoid cannibalizing revenue. It looks like they realize the train has left. The genie's out of the bottle -- [they] might as well get on board now," said analyst Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group via email.
A handful of partners -- CIBER, itelligence, Optimal Solutions Integration and RunE2E -- have signed onto the new SAP All-in-One licensing option. Other SAP partners wanting to participate must join the company's fast-start program and qualify as a hosting partner, a spokeswoman said.
RunE2E LLC already hosts All-in-One CRM applications for customers but had work within the old license model and so welcomed this news.
"Prior to this announcement, we bought a perpetual license from SAP and would figure out billing over 36 months for the client. What this does is take those lumps out of the equation," said Mark Alexander, CEO of the Alpharetta, Ga., company.
Cincinnati-based itelligence Inc., another longtime SAP All-in-One partner, already hosted vertical applications -- in wholesale distribution, consumer packaged goods, food and bakery processing -- —but none of those customers were yet paying by subscription. CEO Steve Niesman expects that to change now.
SAP All-in-One gets partner friendlier
Over the past few years, many customers have embraced the cloud in part because it freed them from big one-off license sales that qualified as capital expenditures. They preferred the predictable, more incremental subscription payout that shows up as operational expense. Niesman and Alexander agreed that that preference will continue even when the economy recovers.
"This is a natural evolution in the software market to 'cloud computing' and natural direction software. [It will give] customers the option of on or off premise, license sale or subscription," Niesman said.
Late or not, this is a good move because customers have been asking partners for subscription-based pricing, Wang said. Even aside from the capex versus opex discussion, the [audience] for CRM and increasingly for ERP is used to for SaaS pricing models.
Wang also downplayed a suggestion that this deal might impact Business ByDesign, perhaps siphoning off prospective customers. "You have to remember that [All-in-One] is deeper in vertical functionality. [ByDesign] is still more a horizontal-based offering. However, it sets up SAP customers and shareholders for the expectations of subscription-based pricing," Wang said.