SAP woos SMEs with Business ByDesign refresh

SAP Business ByDesign now has improved support for mobile devices

SAP has revisited its Business ByDesign software suite, offering a range of improvements for corporate users.

An additional feature pack can help speed on-demand adoption, according to the firm, which added that the new tools are available now.

As well as adding features such as improved support for mobile devices, the firm has widened the release market for the software, and the Business ByDesign kit is available in the US and UK, as well as China, France, Germany and India.

"With the general availability of feature pack 2.5 we have achieved a major milestone," said Peter Lorenz, executive vice president for SME solutions at SAP.

"The on-demand services for Business ByDesign are operated on the most modern cloud infrastructure, and allow for true volume business. We also expect the new starter packages to enable customers to quickly adopt the services and realise immediate results on their path to an integrated on-demand suite."

Helping firms adopt its software are three starter kits, which are fairly self-explanatory and should, SAP said, tempt more users over to its packages.

SAP said that they should appeal to firms with as few as 10 staffers that want to expand the types of applications they use without getting bogged down in costly new systems and software rollouts.

Out now are a customer relationship management package, which the firm said would apply to all stages of the sales process, and take users right through to order resolution. This starts at around €9,000 (£7,440).

Secondly, the firm announced an enterprise resource planning (ERP) package which, again, offers a low-entry point for a commonly used business app. SAP said that this option should appeal to firms that have outgrown their current accounting systems and need to apply more sophisticated analytics.

Although a starter option, SAP added that it would take about six weeks to be implemented. The ERP starter kit costs €24,900 (£20,580) and has a subscription price of €133 (£110) per user.

Finally, SAP announced Professional Service Provider, a business process management toolkit for small and medium sized businesses. SAP said that this would help these smaller firms "level the playing field" with better financed competitors.

This costs €34,900 (£28,850) to implement and has a per user subscription cost of €133 (£110).

The German software giant will be hoping the new offerings help to entice more SMEs. Business ByDesign has been plagued ever since its launch by the scalability issues inherent in running the solution through a virtual blade environment.