SAP to launch additional Business By Design features this year

SAP is to launch a suite of new features for its Business By Design platform during 2011 to give customers more capabilities when using on-premise and cloud hosted services.

The first tool will be a cloud-hosted version of the Sales On-Demand CRM tool that can integrate with SAP's on-premise system so that large-enterprises can use a hybrid model to give workers access to sales information on mobile devices.

The product will be demonstrated at CeBit next week, and launched on 1 April in Germany and the wider European market.

"Sales on-Demand has been part of the By Design platform for some time, but this is about bringing it to larger enterprise customers so they can integrate it with their backbone systems," Rainer Zinow, senior vice president of on-demand strategy at SAP, told V3.co.uk.

SAP is also set to unveil two further applications at CeBit - Travel and Expense Manager By Design and Career By Design - which Zinow said will be launched in the second or third quarter of 2011.

Zinow also revealed that SAP will showcase a demonstration version of SAP Store that will host applications which SAP customers can download to run on top of the Business By Design platform, similar to the iTunes store.

"We will issue a beta version at CeBit next week and the go-live launch will be in May at our Sapphire event in Orlando. We expect to have some 50 to 70 applications on launch, and then our developer community can create more," he said.

SAP said that it had out-surpassed its expectations for 2010 in the UK for customers using Business By Design with growth of 120 per cent during the year, and that the company hopes to see a wide range of businesses on the platform as it grows.

"We would like to see a mixed base of customers as we grow, maybe around 30 per cent of small, medium and large customers, give or take," said Ian Anstey, head of SAP Business ByDesign in the UK.

"We are seeing a lot of small entrepreneurial companies take the product at the moment due to its ease of use and future scalability. We promise them we will be able to grow with their needs as they expand."