Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Business Two Zero » Blog Archive » SAP A1S - the game changing software on show at CeBIT
Business Two Zero » Blog Archive » SAP A1S - the game changing software on show at CeBIT: "According to the spokesman, Kagermann promised to give the market more details about the product over the next few months and said the company is still on track to bring A1S to market in the fourth quarter of 2007 or the first quarter of 2008. Apparently there are 150 beta customers already using it.
But the rollout of the new hosted service will not steal customers from B1, SAP’s lower cost traditional offering that is also highly preconfigured, Kagermann said. On the contrary, “we expect more than 50,000 of our targeted customer base of 100,000 by 2010 to be Business One customers,” he said.
If you piece these ideas together, none of the questions I asked in my earlier piece have been addressed. If anything I’ve got more questions:
If SAP are segmenting the SME market by size with B1, A1S and then All-in-One, and if the product in the middle band has significantly lower cost of ownership, reduced consulting and quicker implementation, why would customers buy the other two products? The car comparison works comparing SME requirements against a larger enterprise, but doesn’t work within the SME space as they’ve defined it.
How will the A1S business model fit within the normal SAP culture and alongside the 3 other traditional products?
SAP have 39,000 customers to date. How are they going to get to 100,000 customers by 2010? Even more importantly, how are over 50,000 of those customers going to be B1 customers? I just don’t see how they are going to get there from here. "
But the rollout of the new hosted service will not steal customers from B1, SAP’s lower cost traditional offering that is also highly preconfigured, Kagermann said. On the contrary, “we expect more than 50,000 of our targeted customer base of 100,000 by 2010 to be Business One customers,” he said.
If you piece these ideas together, none of the questions I asked in my earlier piece have been addressed. If anything I’ve got more questions:
If SAP are segmenting the SME market by size with B1, A1S and then All-in-One, and if the product in the middle band has significantly lower cost of ownership, reduced consulting and quicker implementation, why would customers buy the other two products? The car comparison works comparing SME requirements against a larger enterprise, but doesn’t work within the SME space as they’ve defined it.
How will the A1S business model fit within the normal SAP culture and alongside the 3 other traditional products?
SAP have 39,000 customers to date. How are they going to get to 100,000 customers by 2010? Even more importantly, how are over 50,000 of those customers going to be B1 customers? I just don’t see how they are going to get there from here. "
