News and Views from SAP's Sapphire Show and User Conference 2008
Hot topics of conversation included: Business ByDesign's slow rollout and future plans, Rimini Street's offering of third-party maintenance for SAP applications, and the SAP and RIM partnership for business users' BlackBerrys.
Mirchandani also writes that SAP reiterated BBD pricing would not change much from the $150 per user, per month that has been previously announced. In addition, both Kagermann and Apotheker reiterated that BBD will offer a 10 times reduction in total cost of ownership, though they're not quite there yet. That said, "even a three- to four-times reduction in on-premise TCO would be delightful to the current customer base," Mirchandani adds.
To Forrester's Wang, SAP executives "realized that they had to slow down the adoption for BBD," he says. "There appears to be a focused pilot strategy of limiting the number of countries while they try to reign in overall costs and iron out some technology issues."
Lastly, the union of SAP and RIM to deliver SAP's business applications to BlackBerrys was another hot topic of conversation, Wang says. The recently announced partnership will start with SAP's CRM applications; RIM will build the customized application for its BlackBerry handheld product line. The plan is to eventually design and deliver interfaces for SAP's ERP and supply chain software suites as well.
Wang says that Forrester has spoken with more than 100 SAP customers "who are looking forward to the opportunity to use their RIM devices" with their SAP applications.
