Infor and Golden Gate make a bid for Lawson

Over the weekend (or on Monday if you really “turn off” over the weekend), we all saw the news that Infor and Golden Gate Capital had made a $1.84b bid for Lawson. I watched all the Tweeting and chatter yesterday with interest. Prior to venturing into the analyst/research community about five years ago, I spent over 30 years in the enterprise applications world, the last 22 of which I never officially changed jobs. But during those 22 years, the company name on my business card changed five times. Also during those 22 years, I “experienced” first-hand 14 different acquisitions, sometimes being the acquirer, sometimes being the acquiree. Sometimes I was intimately involved and sometimes I was a casual observer on the periphery.  So I consider myself quite experienced, if not an expert, on mergers and acquisitions of software companies.  While all this chatter is interesting, one thing I can say with certainty is this: at this point it all boils down to speculation and gossip.

I know both of these ERP companies very well, both from the context of their products, as well as their history of software acquisitions. Within my first few months of joining Aberdeen back in March 2006, I wrote about acquisitions by Infor and Lawson that were quite momentous. About that time, three companies were approximately the same size in terms of revenue: Infor, SSA Global and Lawson. Shortly thereafter, in part in a bid to outdistance Infor and SSA, Lawson acquired Intentia in May 2006, only to be one-upped by Infor , which not only acquired SSA Global but also Systems Union and Extensity in August.

Lawson and Infor are both similar and different. They are similar in that both are primarily ERP solution providers that have grown by acquisition, and have stretched the boundaries of traditional ERP with complementary solutions such as Human Capital Management, Asset Management, Performance Management and Business Intelligence, etc. Also, neither has grown very significantly since those major acquisitions back in 2006.

However, there are some glaring differences. Lawson essentially has two major (largely non-overlapping) product lines:

·         S3 (which stands for Staff, Source and Serve) targets healthcare, retail, government, education, financial services, general service

·         M3 (which stands for Make, Move and Maintain) targets fashion, food and beverage, wholesale distribution, asset intensive industries and general manufacturing

Infor has many different ERP solutions as well as stand-alone complementary solutions. Here’s the latest list I have of just its ERP solutions alone:

• Infor ERP Adage
• Infor ERP SX.enterprise
• Infor ERP SyteLine
• Infor ERP VISUAL
• Infor ERP COM
• Infor ERP FACTS
• Infor ERP LN 6.1
• Infor ERP LX
• Infor ERP Baan5.x
• Infor ERP BaanIV
• Infor ERP BPCS
• Infor ERP Xpert
• Infor ERP Blending
• Infor ERP XA
• Infor ERP TRANS4M
• Infor ERP AS
• Infor ERP System 21
• Infor ERP VISUAL Jobshop
• Infor ERP A+
• Infor ERP TakeStock
• Infor ERP Enspire
• Infor ERP commerce@work
• Infor ERP CAS
• Infor ERP Infinium MM/PM
• Infor ERP MK
• Infor ERP MANMAN
• Infor ERP MAX + TM
• Infor ERP MAXCIM
• Infor ERP PRISM
• Infor ERP Protean
• Infor ERP KBM
• Infor ERP Leanware
• Infor ERP PRMS

Some of these are strategic to Infor’s growth, while others must be viewed as legacy or “heritage” products (a “heritage” product is a legacy application you are proud of.) Although Infor has decried a rationalization strategy and maintained all acquired products, not all get equal share of the marketing or development budgets. Unlike Lawson’s two product lines, which have little overlap, many of Infor’s product lines do indeed overlap with each other and this has presented a challenge to Infor in the past, both in product maintenance and development, as well as market presence. If this acquisition does go through, M3 will compete with several of Infor’s existing ERP solutions. There is less similarity with S3, but it will compete with the Masterpiece and Infinium product lines, but will position Infor better in competing in the Human Capital space and also in Healthcare.

But, as I mentioned earlier, this is all just speculation. Will Infor raise its bid? Will others start to bid? If so, who? There are only questions right now, no answers. But some of the questions that must indeed be answered before this is all played out are similar to the questions that must be asked in most any acquisition. Questions like:

·         If there is a merger between Lawson and Infor (or any other competing vendor) will Lawson remain relatively autonomous or will it be entirely integrated? This will impact both its brand as well as the possible reduction in force that generally follows any acquisition.

·         What will be the impact on product roadmaps of all the products owned by the combined companies, regardless of whether additional bids emerge and who wins?

·         Will technology infrastructures be merged, or kept a separate? Consider for example very different cloud strategies, Lawson on the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform (Amazon and other partners provide the infrastructure; Lawson provides the application.)  The two key components of Infor’s cloud strategy and its infrastructure: Microsoft's Windows Azure and Infor ION.

One thing that should be a “given” is the continued support to Lawson’s existing customer base. In any acquisition of this magnitude, growth (and not attrition of) the installed base is always a goal. Existing customers should rest assured this will be a primary goal of Infor, or any other player that joins the fray. Exactly what that means remains to be seen.

SAP GRC 10.0 delivers value. The voice of the SAP customer has never been stronger

I’ve just spent a full day at the SAP Insider GRC 2011 event, where over 700 GRC professionals from all over the world gathered to network, share experiences and hear about new developments from SAP.  This is an annual event, co-located with SAP Insider Financials 2011 and HR 2011, the 9^th of its kind, and my 4^th. As a conference within a conference, the message from SAP had a dual focus for GRC 2011, but with a common theme – delivering more value to its customers by listening carefully to their needs. Previews of the upcoming release of GRC 10.0 (currently in ramp-up with general availability planned for Q2) were a testament to the fact that the voice of the SAP customer has never been stronger.

Sanjay Poonan, SAP’s President of Global Solutions & Go-to-Market, delivered the general keynote entitled Creating Competitive Advantage with Business Analytics. It was refreshing in that the keynote itself was less about the latter (SAP’s products) and more about the former. It’s really all about

·         seeking operational excellence

·         providing visibility for better decision-making, including analytics and performance monitoring

·         supporting a risk-aware and compliance culture

·         developing a people and talent agenda

How can SAP help its customers gain this advantage both in general and in the context of GRC specifically? Over the past few years SAP has built an impressive portfolio of solutions under the umbrella of GRC. While a convenient “category,” GRC has never been crisply defined as evidenced by all the different definitions that are floating around. Indeed over the course of the day I spent at the conference, I heard several speakers refer to GRC as Governance, Risk and Confusion. If you are looking for definitions, the OCEG Group Red Book (Standards and guidelines | by OCEG the Open Compliance and Ethics Group) is a good place to start.

For SAP, GRC is a convenient grouping of solutions that have been developed and acquired over time. However, although its GRC portfolio is extensive, it has been more of a collection than a true suite of products. As far back as March 2008 when SAP announced new versions of products across this portfolio it referred to this launch as a “unified approach to GRC”. This launch included new versions of the SAP GRC Access Control, SAP GRC Process Control and SAP GRC Global Trade Services applications. In addition, the SAP GRC Risk Management application was integrated with the SAP Strategy Management application, which was then separated as part of SAP’s enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions. The goal even back then was to enable organizations to drive an integrated corporate strategy that synchronizes the management of enterprise risks, business controls and global trade compliance.

But the solutions were still separate applications built on different technology platforms, without a common user interface. They did not share data or workflows. They felt like different products. They behaved like different products. Therefore as an existing customer who may have started with Access Control, and was looking for a trade compliance or process control or risk management solution, there really wasn’t a significant advantage in sticking with the SAP family of products.

That all changes with GRC 10.0. SAP has transformed a collection of disparate applications into a platform for GRC. There is a common look and feel. Master data can be shared across Access Control, Process Control and Risk Management. For example, the rich organizational structure that was available in Process Control can now be used in Access Control. All use the same workflow structure, supporting integrated monitoring. And perhaps just as important, is the embedded (SAP Business Objects) BI. Excelsius-based dashboards are pervasive throughout the solution and navigational tools such as Explorer are available as well.

Acknowledging the confusion over GRC and relatively low adoption rates (as compared to other enterprise applications), as a platform provider, SAP’s objectives are to simplify the message of what it will deliver, while providing a lot of meat and not just sizzle behind the messaging. SAP knows its goals need to align with the goal of the GRC professional. Simply put, that goal is to proactively balance risk and opportunity to:

1. Better manage compliance and risk
2. Better protect value – proactively avoid risk events;  reduce cost of violations
3. Better perform – actively  link risk and performance management and objectives

In order to do this, the platform must support the ability to analyze, manage and monitor. One key advantage SAP will have over GRC point solutions is in making the connection back to operational systems of record (think ERP). Not only is SAP uniquely positioned to do this with its own ERP solutions, but it is also proactively working with a partner (Greenlight Technologies : Solutions : SAP GRC Cross-Platform : RTA Design Studio for Access Control) to also connect to other business systems such as legacy applications and other commercially packaged solutions.

These are all great enhancements, and create an incredibly comprehensive solution and significant market advantage in turning a collection into a platform. The old SAP probably would have stopped here. But the new SAP took two additional steps.

While SAP has been concentrating on developing the GRC platform and focusing on the technology, management understands a platform is simply a tool. Nobody looks to buy a platform. They look to solve a business problem. So the value of these efforts will be lost if the customer cannot go that last mile to connect to the business, sometimes with very industry-specific requirements. And often that specific expertise must be both deep and broad. The proliferation of regulatory requirements alone these days makes it difficult for any one company to provide this level of knowledge and expertise across a wide range of businesses. So while SAP focuses on technology and platform, it lets partners focus on the domain expertise for consulting as well as the development of plug-in applications through its Ecohub (http://ecohub.sdn.sap.com/irj/ecohub/home ).

And finally, and likely most important for the customers, has been the active listening process. Eighty six customers from the GRC customer advisory council would not have showed up for a daylong meeting with product management and development if they did not feel their voice was being heard. In the course of these types of conversations, three things have emerged: the effort required to manage GRC, the elimination of manual processes and reduction of cost. While in the past SAP may have simply concentrated on offering those high profile but often under-utilized leading edge features, this time it also included a lot of the mundane and boring features that simply can lead to improved day-to-day efficiencies. As a result it has made GRC 10.0 much more appealing to its existing customers. In many cases, the customer can justify implementation based on just one new feature.

Each new customer that moves to GRC 10.0 will be another testament to the value of listening to the voice of the customer.

Activant announces new Business Rules Engine

Last Thursday I questioned whether IT spoke the language of business. In that short commentary, I used a couple of examples. One of them was “abstraction.” I mentioned that, “if you tell a business person you can set up rules that will govern processes once, and those rules will be enforced by all your business systems, then you have introduced the concept of abstraction without having ever said the word.”

Today I read that Activant has introduced a Business Rule Engine for Distributors.  This is exactly the type of feature I was talking about – one that takes the solution beyond the traditional transaction and reporting ERP of old. The Business Rule Engine provides Prophet 21 users with the ability to insert their own business logic into the Prophet 21 code base without altering the application code itself.

Some examples provided by Kevin Roach, executive vice president and general manager of Activant's Wholesale Distribution Division included:

·         Conversion rules that auto-populate some fields based on others -  like the town or city and state based on zip code? These are the types of “smart” features we have become accustomed to through our own personal online shopping experiences. Heck, I was a catalogue shopper long before the Internet and even back in those days I had customer service reps automatically filling in my town and state based on my zip code. But I didn’t see the same intelligence in business applications. This is a very simple example, but there are scores of ways to use this kind of functionality.   Like certain compliance requirements based on type of product.  Activant suggests an item entered with a product group of Pharmaceuticals could automatically set the Pedigree Tracking Checkbox to be checked. Or food and beverage for nutritional labeling, etc.  As new requirements are added, new rules reflect the changes with far less disruption than mucking around in code.

·         Validation Rules:  Another Activant example, Customer A can only buy items with Item Class 1 set to "No Restrictions." The system will provide an error message if an item without that Item Class is entered on an order for Customer A. These validations basically allow for the creation of warnings and error messages based on rules being met or not met.

·         Asynchronous Workflows. A third Activant example… a distributor could set up a workflow so that a purchase order placed in the amount of $5,000-$10,000 triggers an alert to an authorizing manager for signoff, while an order over $10,000 triggers an alert for the CFO's signoff. When the inserted trigger is activated in the Prophet 21 software, the rules included in that workflow will be executed in the sequence indicated.  Those are the rules today, but perhaps during a downturn in business, you need to (temporarily?) reduce those authorization levels or require the CFO to additionally review all purchases. Perhaps the rules tomorrow will add the type of purchase. Maybe a requisition generated for direct materials will be handled differently than indirect materials.

Why are these features and these examples (which appear to be so simple) so important? Because these business rules are subject to change. And if they are embedded within the logic of the application then changes to your business either require changes to your application (think source code and programming) or prevent your business from adapting.

If you are using older, outdated technology, and looking to upgrade or replace…perhaps this type of requirement is not top of mind. But all ERP users should be clamoring for this type of logic to be extracted (or abstracted) from the underlying code so that it puts the power of change in the hands of the business user.

Does IT speak the language of business?

I just spent a few minutes reading Tom Wailgum’s article entitled SAP and IT: Best Buddies, Worst Enemies. Definitely worth reading as it is so apropos. And apart from the fact that is was posted as ASUG news, the title could probably just as well have been ERP and IT. This isn’t just an SAP problem.

I spent most of my 30 years prior to becoming an analyst working for ERP companies (or their predecessors, because ERP isn’t as old as I am!) During that time … and continuing today… one of the biggest challenges was getting to the line of business LoB executives, past the CIO gatekeeper, during the selling process. Given who ultimately signs off on the deal (often the CFO or the CEO) you would have thought it would be easier. But it isn’t.

Often this is because sometimes the business world and IT appear not to speak the same language. Tom makes a very good point in saying, “…if [SAP] wants to sell to the business, it’s got to be able to talk to the business in a way that not just Computer Science grads can understand.” Again, I think you can substitute any other ERP vendor’s name. I have always made a point of talking about any enterprise business system in a business context, highlighting the successes versus the failures and measuring the success by the business benefits rather than cost, time to implement or other measures that tend to be the domain of the IT staff. In spite of having a master’s degree in computer science, I consider myself much more a businesswoman than a technologist. But even I fall into the IT jargon trap occasionally.

Often some of the most important business benefits result from the effective use of underlying technology infrastructure – like SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). But ask any business person if they care about SOA, and you will probably either get a glazed, disinterested look, or you will lose their attention completely. But if you talk about the benefits of SOA – easier integration, better connection to and communication with their business partners, then it will resonate.

Or take the concept of “abstraction.” The non-IT person might first think of Picasso’s art or Carl Jung’s psychology or philosophy, which I bet wasn’t the favorite college subject of your typical CFO. To a technologist, abstraction is an intuitive concept. It is very difficult to explain to someone esle (who might not have a clue) something that is immediately and intuitively understood. But if you tell a business person you can set up rules that will govern processes once, and those rules will be enforced by all your business systems, then you have introduced the concept of abstraction without having ever said the word. But it probably won’t really mean anything to them until they want to change the rules. If they find they only have to make a simple change once and it is propagated through all the business systems automatically, they now understand the value.

In order for any company to maximize the business value of ERP or any enterprise business system it must be embraced by the line of business executives responsible for delivering business performance. In order for that to happen, either the line of business needs to be more IT-savvy or the solution providers and the IT professionals need to learn the language of business.

Weighing in on SAP Sales OnDemand: Keeping competitors off SAP turf

In just one short day there have been numerous commentaries on SAP’S upcoming release of SAP Sales OnDemand, announced at CeBIT yesterday (March 1, 2011). So while I may not be telling anyone anything new, I felt I would be remiss in not commenting. Many have been headlining the announcement as a direct threat to Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM OnDemand. Yes it might be, but not because it competes directly against either. But it just might keep these two competing products out of the SAP accounts.

SAP Sales OnDemand is exactly what the name implies… a tool for sales. It is just one of the three legs of CRM (sales force automation, customer service and support and marketing automation). But let’s face it, many companies that deploy CRM only use it as a sales tool.  Yet in spite of this limited slice of the CRM pie, John Wookey, SAP’s EVP of Line of Business OnDemand claims this solution is unique in that it is a more comprehensive solution.

More comprehensive? How?

Software solutions in the past have modeled a business process in a rather linear fashion. Instead, SAP went back to the beginning and looked at the business problem, which presumably in this scenario was and is, for SAP customers, how to sell more. What are the roles that all come together in achieving this goal? How do they interact now and how do they want to interact? Does it take a “village” to make a sale? When I first heard how good Sales OnDemand was at allowing sales to collaborate I was skeptical. The desire or motivation to collaborate isn’t always included in the DNA of a sales rep. But if it means truly getting a 360^o view of a customer, then yes, collaboration is required.

And for that you not only need a sales tool, you also have to connect it to your other solutions, like ERP. I have always argued that a CRM solution does not provide a 360^o view of a customer unless you use it for something other than what it was intended for. Where are the transactions, the shipments, the receivables?  And what about the unstructured data that floats across the Internet, feeding you important data about your customer? Feeds about their earnings, legal battles, trends in their market with a direct impact? Take a look at the demo on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fftC39Q7jM8&feature=player_embedded ) and you’ll see this kind of Feeds and collaboration is really “Home” for the sales rep using Sales OnDemand.

So to me SAP Sales OnDemand is more about connecting the dots. If it can truly complete the view of the customer, the prospect, sale for the SAP ERP customer, then there is no need to look further.

When customers have a voice: 3 solution providers who listen well

You probably all have friends out there that send you jokes and other amusing (or not) trivia by email. Some will be selective. Some will not… sort of like two of my cousin who seems to send me everything that comes into her Inbox. The problem with these kind of distribution lists is that there is no way to unsubscribe without hurting someone’s feelings. So the delete button gets a lot of use on my keyboard.

But for the ones that are selective, sometimes there is some useful information. Like just this morning I learned that “a paraprosdokian is a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part. It is frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing an anticlimax. For this reason, it is extremely popular among comedians and satirists.” So the first thing I did was forward it to my friend who is also a stand-up comedian. I know he is always looking for material.

But apart from the obvious value to my comic friend, I did find some of these paraprosdokians applicable to the art of developing software solutions. I say “art” purposely. While developing these solutions may be (computer) science, the process of deciding on a product roadmap is far less objective.

For example:

” To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.”

This is what happens when the developers (I use the term loosely) make all the product decisions while never venturing out into the real world.

The corollary… “The voices in my head may not be real, but they have some good ideas!”

This is what happens when the developers make all the product decisions while never venturing out of their own space at all.

The result, when the first two are ignored… “You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.”

So the lesson to be learned and applied to the art of developing the roadmap of an enterprise business system is pretty simple:  Listen to your customers. There are 3 developers of enterprise business systems that come immediately to mind here (caveat - I don’t mean to say of course that there are no other solution providers with a particular focus on the customer):

Plex Systems:  You might have heard me say this before, but the reason Plex began offering a SaaS deployment model for ERP long before it was “hot” was because Plex’s founder was an advocate and a pioneer of rapid application development and he was looking for a way to deliver new enhancements at an equally rapid pace. Last year I attended Tom Mackey’s (Plex’s EVP of Sales) worldwide sales meeting. As I watched one of the Plex developers demo something the team was in the process of developing specifically for a large customer and as I learned how long it took the team to create the enhancement (all “customizations” developed by Plex are productized as opt-in features) it struck me that they had gotten this far in the time it might have taken other development teams to tell the sales team why they couldn’t or shouldn’t do it. As this realization dawned on me I heard their head of development say that his team didn’t develop any functionality speculatively. All features and functions were developed by request of a customer or a prospect.

Because Plex was developing features and functions so rapidly there was a time when they were having difficulty keeping up with the documentation. The customers brought this to the attention of management at the Plex user conference a couple years back, but they also brought a solution. Why not have the customers using these enhancements contribute to the documentation, wiki-style? Because these customers were so actively engaged with the company and the development process, this worked out quite well.

Now, there is one downside to this approach. You can’t enter a brand new market this way. But you can expand the boundaries of the markets that you already play in. And that is exactly what Plex has done. Early on, based on its proximity to Detroit, its business was largely in the automotive market. But as it began to expand beyond the state of Michigan, it found many of the features and functions required by other industries were either already built in or very close. For example the product already satisfied the requirements of compliance and traceability in automotive and these were easily adapted to packaged foods. And so on….

Sage Software: Over the past decade, much of Sage’s growth has been by acquisition. However, the second half of 2010 saw a resurgence in organic growth. This has been as a result of a combination of growth by acquiring new customers with an expanded range of offers and increasing share of customer spend through support and cross-selling. In 2010 Sage added 250,000 new customers, half of them here in North America. Now of course, not all of these were ERP customers, but enterprise business systems dominated. And there was also significant growth in spend from existing customers, largely through increased web offerings and a rapidly growing set of connected services – web-based and mobile services that connect to existing products.

Much of this approach resulted from an aggressive campaign to visit and listen to existing customers, which has been a primary focus of the management team. While a new focus, Sage has seen it paying dividends. For example, Sage has seen a growing interest from ERP customers in payment services. By satisfying this need, Sage also benefits since by adding these payment services, it can nearly double customer spend.

Syspro is the third enterprise business system provider that comes to mind when I think of close customer relationships. Syspro reports some of the highest customer retention rates in the industry and largely attributes them to personal one-to-one relationships with its customers, with a heavy emphasis on “personal.” Perhaps it is the South African heritage of the company, but execs like Joey Benedretti (president of Syspro North America) take any issue with a customer very personally. Just go out to their website and search on “awards” and you will see a plethora of nominations and wins. Probably the most telling of these awards in terms of customer focus is the Stevie Award. SYSPRO 6.1, the newest release of SYSPRO ERP software, was presented with a People's Choice Stevie Award for Favorite New End User Software Product at the 2010 American Business Awards last June. SYSPRO 6.1 included over 1,500 new customer-requested features and functions plus ease-of-use enhancements including dashboards, workflow services and process modeling and a new user interface that combines personalization and power-tailoring options.

All three of these solution providers develop a target with purpose and customer focus, listening to the voices of their customers which provide the perfect canopy to float development efforts.

SAP positioned for explosive growth in channels - that means SME

In 2010 SAP got very serious about channels, setting out to make profound transformational change. Not satisfied with incremental progress, SAP was looking to change the very DNA of its channel programs. A year ago, there were 5 different channel programs. Today there is one. Recruiting from the outside and shuffling the deck internally resulted in a 90% change in the management team. According to Kevin Gilroy, SVP Ecosystem and Channels, the current team is fired up “to make history.”

What’s happened in the past year? First of all… a lot of training. No longer is the channel just about the P&L, it is also about the balance sheet. There was a concentration on speeding the time to revenue and understanding the value of having an off-payroll sales force. But to keep those off-payroll channel sales partners interested and engaged, SAP needed to become more predictable. In August, SAP Business ByDesign, and SME in general went 100% channel. Since then only 2 or 3 exceptions have been made for direct sales.

Secondly, the new management team challenged existing processes. Here there was a definite advantage in having new eyes taking a fresh look at the old ways of doing business. They ripped out non-value added steps and sought to reduce disruption for the customer. They went so far as to remove the operational flavor of the team and replace it with a focus on the experience. The directive from management – if you aren’t improving the experience of the employee, partner or customer, either re-engineer the process or don’t do it. One example, the “experience” team took a 20 page leasing document and reduced it to 2 pages, reducing the turnaround from two weeks down to one day. The goal is one page, one minute turnaround. They have also simplified contracts so as to simplify the conversation and not to scare away customers.

The focus in 2011 is on meeting the needs of the SME. This means:

·         Delivering more choice and more packages tailored to the SME

·         Increased sales capability and capacity through channels and inside sales

·         Building a volume-based marketing engine. Marketing dollars will not be distributed evenly across the channel. SAP will pour more money in to fuel those with marketing engines.  

·         Continue to work on the” experience”. Optimize operations and processes around the needs of the SME users and partners.

But probably most important of all is to work on market perception. The ultimate objective of course is to turn the channel into a real volume business and this means selling more to smaller companies. SAP still is viewed as the 800lb gorilla in the market and many SMEs simply assume it is not for them – either it is too complicated or too expensive. Over the past year in talking with both Business ByDesign and Business One customers, it was not unusual for them to say to me, “I never thought I would be here. Who would have thought SAP had a solution for me that I could afford?” They don’t realize that 79% of SAP’s 109,000 customers are SME. That translates to 86,000 SMEs running SAP.

I think that Business ByDesign is going to play a very significant role in changing the market perception. ByDesign has the advantage of being a brand new product, engineered for the SME to reduce complexity. In fact SAP is finding it to be a real door opener that may lead either to a SaaS ERP (ByDesign) sale or an on-premise sale of All-in-One or Business One. Once that door is open, many are finding the price tag of the on-premise solutions is far more affordable than they assumed.