Traditionally, the very thought of Enterprise Applications often struck a chord with several aspects of large-scale – time-to-awareness, time-to-evaluate, installation infrastructure, implementation time and cost, to name a few. All in large scale – one of the main reasons that majority of the consumption came from relatively large enterprises. In recent times, however, this tradition has been seeing a fast disruption, in the world of SAP, through innovative software packaging models & effectively leveraging more recent technologies.

SAP, with its slew of strategic moves such as Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS), unification of Mobility platforms, HANA-based solutions, host of On-Demand solutions plus the Cloud-based offerings (eg. HANA-one as well as the aforementioned solutions), is setting a new trend in customer adoption of its solutions. The trend, when seen holistically, is at a convergence of these offerings potentially giving an exceptional advantage to clients across three key dimensions: quicker, leaner & agile. Here’s a bird’s eye view of what drive this trend.

RDS

• Transparent promise of fixed scope, time & price.
• As a norm, the implementation timeline is capped at 12weeks.
• Aimed at significantly improving the ratio of software cost to implementation cost
• Cloud RDS offering enables test-drive and jump-start, and allows migration on-premise
• 100+ packages and growing

On-Demand (OD) Solutions

• Wide range – Business One, Business ByDesign, BO-BI-, Customer-, Sales-, Financial-, Travel-, Social-OD to name a few
• Allows picking in proportion to the business needs and investment plans on hand.
• Suitable for large enterprises too to test-drive or/and adopt specific solutions
• Lean enough to adopt specific solutions under different business situations (e.g. addition of subsidiaries or creating POCs
  etc.)
• Cloud-based OD offers high agility to test-drive and adopt in an economical way

Cloud

• Helps minimize upfront Capex
• Moderates the need for specialized staff to operate
• Enables high agility for IT to respond to business needs
• Offers high scalability vis-à-vis business growth & expansions of enterprises
• Enables quick test-driving of technology platforms (e.g. HANA, SUP, etc.) & solutions (OD) & jump-start adoption
  in an easy & low-cost fashion
• Wide range of partnership options and cloud strategies (public, private, hybrid, etc.)

This trend potentially empowers customers (SMEs or otherwise) to virtually cherry-pick & embrace solutions with more freedom and agility, in relatively
quick & economical ways. Interestingly, this is fast becoming a field for various consulting & technology players to leverage the convergence, make a differentiation and bring value to their clients across the three dimensions.