News that SAP will offer a SaaS product. They’re intending to service around 100 000 punters, while not cannibalising their existing revenue streams.
The unreasonable men pour scorn on the idea over here, saying that “incumbents don’t like disruption because its almost certainly an extraneous force impacting on how they do business” and that it is thus oxymoronic to have incumbents embracing a disruptive technology.
Let’s get one thing straight – I don’t think SAP will succeed with a SaaS strategy long term, however I disagree with the unreasonable men in that I think there are some short/medium term legs on this product. SAP has sufficient momentum that they should be able to achieve a reasonably degree of traction based on a dual platform of a know brand and a desire held by enterprise to move to SOA for that product.
It’s like MYOB coming out with an SME accounting package delivered by SaaS. While it may not be viable long term (and even that I wouldn’t be 100% sure about) they would get immediate traction from substitution transfers between their client/server product and their SaaS offering.
Yet another reason that Xero had to go the IPO route to scale rapidly in order to fight of other challengers.
Hey Ben,
Not sure i agree with this. MYOB have come out with a SaaS version, only not their own (netsuite), because THEY couldn’t make the switch between on premise and SaaS, in otherword manage the disruption.
SAP’s marketing and brand presence might get them some takers but in the end this isn’t in their DNA, which is why their leading SaaS evangalist left about 6 months ago… citing it was just too hard (i’m on holiday so don’t have the link)