SAP SaaS marches on

SAP is laying out a strong SaaS program and has keen view of the future.  They’ve organized themselves into upper domain areas of: People, Money, Customers, Suppliers, and Special.  They then have their horizontal glue layers of Social and Integration.  Finally, they have supporting layer of SaaS ERP in 2 flavors: Business-By-Design and Business One.  This clearly laid out in the illustration below.

Most of the SaaS attention has gone to People with SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors.  Indeed, success factors is leading the SaaS charge at SAP both in terms of ideation and management with Lars Dalgaard heading the cloud unit.  SuccessFactors brings a SaaS pedigree to SAP.

All “legacy” or pre-SaaS software vendors including those like IBM, Oracle, Computer Associates, etc. all face the same challenge.  How to use a usage base metric to drive revenue and determine re-investment.  In addition, legacy vendors often haven’t built in cloud capabilities and multi-tenancy which is the key scaling and upgrades leading to lower costs.  I think you’ll see legacy software vendors buy some of the skills.  I also think as the whole market shifts to cloud, SaaS will simply become the pervasive model and vendors will adapt.

Tersely put, how do you change your revenue stream?

• Old Revenue Formula  = Licenses + Support
• New Revenue Formula  = Utilization metric (i.e. per user, per month, per incident, etc.)

Honestly, I think the non-cloud and even non-SaaS type application will become the exception.  So like all creatures faced with drastic environmental changes, software vendors have 3 choices:

1. Move (find business that can’t use cloud or won’t adopt as fast)
2. Die (easy, just don’t change)
3. Adapt (move to more efficient modes such as re-architecting for SaaS)

One of SAP’s other big SaaS applications is Ariba.  In addition to being a substantial procurement software product with huge numbers of consumers and suppliers in their network, they are the model of moving to cloud and SaaS to survive.  They have already made the adaption.  If SAP is smart, they will take the lessons learned from the trial by fire of Ariba and apply it to their own journey. 

I think the movement to cloud, and mostly to SaaS, is one that all vendors will need to follow to remain viable.  Keep in mind there are companies today that will join the Fortune 500 in the next 5 years and will have never purchased an enterprise class server or purchased enterprise software.  As an industry, How are we going to provide value add services?  How are we going to morph our products to meet their non-procurement cycles?  Are we going to be part of the company that: 1) Moves, 2) Dies, or 3) Adapts. 

Next blog, I’ll talk more about the lower layers of Social, Integration, the two ERP SaaS options which will yield a new way to do roll-outs via 2-tier ERP.

When will Sybase ASE be FREE for all SAP system users

I am surprised SAP has not announced that the standard database from the Sybase acquisition is free to all SAP system users.  I will even be more surprised if they do not make the announcement at Sapphire 2012.

Why would SAP give away Sybase ASE?  They could make some amount of revenue by selling it, but by giving it away they improve the ROI of the migration.  Migration costs are the biggest barrier to any DB or OS change under an SAP system.  In addition, they take away the 20% maintenance and enhancement (M&E) fees their number #1 competitor, Oracle, is gaining from every SAP system running on Oracle.  I wonder how much of the reported $12B Oracle reported of support revenue in 3rd quarter is driven by SAP systems running on Oracle RDBMS.  That is potentially billions of dollars that Oracle does not have to attack SAP, develop new applications, or build a cloud business.  Oracle’s M&E, like everyone in the software business, is a substantial part of the revenue and more importantly profit stream of the business.

In addition, SAP can optimize the ASE database for SAP.  In fact they could make all other vendors’ database versions a port.  The best and brightest capabilities would be in found in the latest release of ASE coupled to SAP.  In addition, they can up sell Sybase Replication Services (SRS) as an Extract, Translate, and Load (ETL) engine, Disaster Recovery (DR) solution, and high availability (HA) solution.  They also can  up sell to HANA for higher performance.

Pushing out ASE will cost something.  SAP will have to support, develop, and move ASE forward.  They should have those resources from the acquisition and from previous DB efforts like mySQL.  Most of that cost is already accounted for excluding the go forward actions to stay on par with other major DB vendors in the SAP world; however, Sybase is are major player in the financials arena today, too.

SAP is going to break some glass with the big database providers, Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM.  While I’m sure they don’t care about Oracle’s opinion, they are strongly partnered with Microsoft and IBM.  It may be taken very poorly by IBM and Microsoft; however, I’m not sure either of them can let go of all the other areas they are linked into SAP especially IBM who has the world’s best (my opinion and Forrester’s) largest SAP practices.

HANA may be getting all the headlines, but the world is not done with RDBMS.  There is still a need.  There are still companies making lots of money, especially Oracle, on RDBMS software.  When is SAP going to give its clients something FREE to smile about and at the same time take so much away from their biggest competitor, Oracle.  Seems like a win-win for SAP and its clients.