The Best-Run Businesses Run SAP

On March 6, 2012, SAP announced big changes in their SMB ERP strategy. The cloud/on-demand offerings from SAP have been so successful that SAP is now extending their cloud offering to Business One, which was previously only available on premise. SAP announced today that Business One will be offered both on premise and on demand. (more…)

Many have their heads in the cloud today. This goes for both individuals, as well as companies. The interest in Software as a Service (SaaS) has been steadily increasing over the past several years, led by enterprise applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and elements of Human Capital Management (HCM) such as recruitment, talent management and benefits administration. (more…)

A lot has been written lately about moving from transactional systems to engagement systems, including one of my own blog posts. There is something to be said for better engagement with customers, but I don’t see this as a “from-to” transition. Recording transactions isn’t optional. Whatever tool you use to create your system of record (whether it is ERP or accounting applications or something else) is a necessary foundational tool and some Small to Midsize Enterprises (SMEs) struggle to provide that solid foundation. (more…)

HANA is effectively bringing companies into the 21^st century, where business is conducted in real-time.  Small and midsized businesses are turning to HANA to free themselves from their archaic 20^th century business processes, which are no longer capable of maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s market. They are also leveraging HANA to put information into the hands of the business users, giving them the freedom from having to rely on IT.  Given that most  (more…)

This year’s SAP TechEd was the first to feature an SME (Small to Midsize Enterprise) track. As we wrap up Las Vegas (next stop Madrid), it is time to reflect on the real relevance to SME of the themes and messages presented at TechEd. Much of the event was an excellent presentation of technology, followed by some ideas and examples of how you might use that technology.  That is the way IT departments in large enterprises might approach their IT strategy and budget. And, after all the intended audience for the event was IT in general and developers in particular. But typically there aren’t any developers in small companies and most SMEs have very limited IT staffs. So really the SME audience at TechEd was the partners that service those SMEs. (more…)

All the talk at SAPTechEd this week has been about HANA, SAP’s new in-memory computing engine. While there were plenty of “techies” at the event this week, you don’t have to be too much of a technologist to understand that processing data that is stored in memory is going to be a lot faster than processing it from disk. And results from early adopters have been more than impressive. Examples include Yodobashi who took the process of running incentive payments from 3 days down to 2 seconds. Or Nong-fu Spring who ran the same script in HANA and in an Oracle data mart and found HANA to be 200 times faster. In fact these results are so impressive, one SAP customer said to me, “It sounds too good to be true.”

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What should a CIO do?

The ERP business is a mature category and on a global basis there are literally hundreds of ERP solutions available for mid-market customers to adopt. In fact, most of the major global SME/SMB vendors offer multiple solutions that have similar features & functionalities for e.g. Microsoft Dynamics has 4 discrete offerings (Axapta, Navision, Great Plains, Solomon), SAP has 3 (SAP Business One, SAP Business All-in-One, SAP Business ByDesign) and Sage simply has (more…)

With nearly 80,000 small-to-midsize customers worldwide, SAP relies on our partners around the globe to service this fast-growing and important segment of our market. With cloud-based solutions like SAP Business ByDesign, that reliance is even greater.

So I reached out to Hans-Peter Holz from SAP partner Steeb to get their view of what SMEs most need in today’s dynamic business climate.

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