SAP moving forward with Business ByDesign

SAP's Business ByDesign software-as-a-service offering has not had an easy ride since its launch in 2007. The German enterprise software giant had to limit the rollout to customers until this year because of a problem with its underlying architecture.

Business ByDesign is aimed at mid-market customers, and provides on-demand software that includes financials, human resources, supply chain management, business analytics and compliance management. However, SAP had to admit soon after the launch that it could not afford to host the suite because it was not based on a multi-tenancy architecture.

The company promised that the problems would be resolved by the summer of this year, and Business ByDesign 2.5 was released in July, hosting customers on a multi-tenancy architecture unless they requested otherwise.

Rainer Zinow, Business ByDesign innovation vice president, said that the scalability problems have now been overcome, while still offering a choice in how customers run their IT services.

"The multi-tenancy option allows us to operate a whole array of customers on a single IT cluster. We can service this cluster once and all the updates will be automatically available to all customers," he said.

"At the same time we are also offering a single-tenancy option for customers wanting their own cluster, even though there is no factual difference between each option from a security and performance standpoint."

Zinow explained that most companies go for a multi-tenancy default setting, but that some "feel better psychologically" running the single-tenancy option.

"Of course, multi-tenancy is the option that is attractive commercially for us. The latest blades we use with the Intel chipset can run more than 500 users on a single blade. Three years ago we could only run 25 customers on a single tenancy," he said.

BusinessByDesign has reached a significant milestone this year with the multi-tenancy option, but Zinow wants to see improvements such as replacing the database that currently runs the service with one that has in-memory capabilities.

"I'm a native developer and I have a long list of additions I want to see in the product in the next 10 years," he said.

"Is it where we want it to be? Not yet. But it's where we want it operationally and now we can focus on adding certain business capabilities."

Zinow claimed that customers are generally happy with the suite, but are asking for more specific business capabilities relating to their industry. The release early next year of a software development kit for Business ByDesign will aim to resolve this by allowing partners to add specific services for niche customers.

"Business ByDesign 3 will then really get deep into the business capabilities our customers would like to see," he said.

Zinow declined to disclose how many customers are using Business ByDesign, or the company's revenue targets for the product, citing SAP policy. Revealing these figures in 2007 had backfired, he said, as the single-tenancy architecture of Business ByDesign meant that the firm failed to meet its public targets.