SAP Business ByDesign fails by 99.2%

Computing Magazine reported today that SAP failed to reach it's sales goals for SAP Business ByDesign. (http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2270656/sap-business-bydesign-struggles)

SAP has signed around 80 customers of the 10,000 expected customers during the first 3 years since launch of the product.  SAP Business ByDesign was a ground up in house development by SAP targeted at the SME sector.  SAP has been troubled by the inability to address the middle market as are all ERP vendors.  It was thought that the difficulties could be resolved by a SAAS offering design and developed internally to SAP.  

However, SAP have not addressed the issues that many SME face such as the need for a flexible and changing business process to adapt to dynamic markets and inorganic growth.  

Open source products like ADempiere, have addressed the needs of SME whilst retaining controls and features of core business processes such as Procure to Pay and Record to Report.  People are recognising that the ability to plug in the true best of breed applications rather than "best of breed" products by the same vendor as your ERP vendor, enables you to reduce the system landscape and associated interface complexity.

Focussing on delivering business processes, open source allows you to choose the tool to deliver the result rather than locking you in to a suite where the choice of one component may lock in your choices for all other components.

The failure of SAP Business ByDesign and Oracle's NetSuite reflects the movement within the Software Industry by business towards the adoption of open source ERP and BI.