SAP Business ByDesign (BBD) delayed

Information coming from SAP is saying that SAP Business ByDesign (BBD) as a Service (SaaS) is going to be delayed for minimum one year or more according German economic newspaper Handelsblatt. Software is offered already to limited number of customer since second half of 2007. There are a lot of rumors and investigations done on this delay in web’s blogospehere. See Dennis Howlett’s post. Other blogger Joshua Greenbaum is revealing possible reasons of this delay as it is:

- Operationalizing the on-demand model in a cost-effective way – Today they have just around 150 customers; a future roll out to ten thousands of customers can’t be scaled up for such an amount of customers on cost effective way.

- Design flaws - fundamental design flaw in the system, seems to be a misunderstanding of building large scale applications.

- Performance issues - Current release has a performance issues which can cause that response time will not be acceptable for large amount of customers.

On other hand it can be just a reason coming from nature of SAP as a company. As they are traditionally Germany’s very conservative company they are too much worrying about potential lost of their reputation in case of trouble with BBD. Other let say “soft” factor can be level of the maturity of the on-demand market. Traditional SaaS vendors (e.g. salesforce.com) used to have similar problems with performance and down times. As SAP is entering this market late that means it could have a software which has no these kind of kids illnesses and be more bullet proof than others.

SAP has spent a huge effort to develop this SME solution already. In terms of money till year 2007 it was according Dave Rosenberg it was over $1 billion. So see what happen next if SAP will be able to full fill a plans related to gain of customers and market share in this area.