Microsoft Dynamics ERP vs SAP Business ByDesign

MBS President, Kirill Tatarinov (at the left) plays with Dynamics AX 2012 via KinectLast week the new version Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 became available in 25 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, UK, US). This new version is interesting for us because it finally adds the cloud services. They work from the Windows Azure cloud in combination with the general ERP software, which can be installed on the company's own server or hosted in a partner data center. Thus, it implements the Microsoft's favorite concept - S + S (Software + Service). Customers can access the cloud services via the customer portal at dynamicsonline.com. There are four groups of services:

Michael Park, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Business Solutions team, shared some plans about the future of company's SaaS suite Microsoft BPOS. BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services) currently includes MS Exchange Online, MS SharePoint Online, MS Office Communications Online and Office Live Meeting. And Microsoft is going to add Dynamics CRM and Dynamics ERP to this package. While it's no surprise with CRM (Microsoft has been providing the SaaS version Dynamics CRM Online for quite a long time), the SaaS ERP from Microsoft - is something new. Today some Microsoft partners are already providing vendor's ERP solutions as hosted services, but Microsoft never told about the release of the own SaaS ERP version.

SAP is the most slow IT giant in terms of transition to the cloud technologies. Nevertheless, it's the world's largest software company and any of its steps to the Cloud serves as an indicator for all large corporations: "if even SAP released a SaaS-solution, then SaaS-solutions can indeed be trusted" or "if even SAP offers a version for Amazon Web Services, than this platform is really enterprise-ready". This week at the SAPPhire conference, the company reported on its cloud transition steps. First of all, the SaaS ERP-service SAP Business ByDesign is already used by 500 with a target of having 1000 signed up by the end of the year. Second, SAP has announced that it's "launching" the SaaS CRM-service SAP Sales OnDemand, which will be followed by a travel management cloud service and an on-demand suite for talent management. And third, SAP has started to adapt its existing systems for the Amazon and Microsoft cloud platforms.

We often pay attention not only to the new business applications and modern trends in Enterprise software, but also on how vendors advertise themselves and their products. This sphere is also shifting to the Enterprise 2.0 style: instead of boring PowerPoint presentations and PDF brochures without images, we see exciting blockbusters and show-projects. Instead of boring descriptions - humorous sketches about how bad is running business without the software. Such marketing attracts attention and most importantly, makes users "friendly" towards the software, even if the software itself is not so friendly, for example like SAP. The new SAP's show-project Run Better is showing not the ERP system but the cool things that its users do. Check also the other examples of beautiful marketing from Box.net, Mainsoft and NetSuite.

Finally, SAP has officially launched its SaaS ERP system, SAP Business ByDesign, which will compete with NetSuite, Workday and other cloud ERP solutions. As you know, it's not a fresh product. It was released 3 years ago, but due to the scalability problems, its sales were stopped, and still the system was used by fewer than 100 companies worldwide. SAP Business ByDesign is designed for SMB (50-500 employees) and primarily for manufacturing and professional services industries. It's a single multitenant service to automate all business areas, including manufacturing, financials and sales. The updated version SAP Business ByDesign 2.5 provides support for mobile devices, integration with MS Excel, custom forms and user interface based on Silverlight. But its pricing will hardly cause a revolution in SaaS sphere.

The world's largest enterprise software vendor, SAP has become even more large. For $5.8 billion SAP has acquired Sybase,  the company primarily known as one of the leading database and enterprise mobile applications vendor. Until now, SAP didn't have its own database and provided customers a freedom of choice in this matter. At the same time SAP was reselling about a billion dollars worth of Oracle databases - a bad idea considering SAP and Oracle are in direct competition. However, it is unlikely that Sybase database will replace all other database middleware in the traditional SAP ERP deployments. On the other hand, it can be very useful for cloud deployments and creation of the own SaaS platform for SAP Business ByDesign. Because Sybase has recently released the cloud version of its database, which is primarily designed for Amazon EC2.

How the Business Intelligence systems will look like in the Enterprise 2.0 world? Major market players are confident that these should be SaaS solutions. Because Business Intelligence requires a lot of computing resources to process the huge amounts of data, and the most effective way to get these resources - is to rent them from the "cloud". Even SAP, which historically doesn't like SaaS, recently released SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand. But simply delivering BI from a cloud - is not so cool, thinks RoamBI. Business Intelligence 2.0 should be beautiful. In order to satisfy executives when they investigate the "health" of the company and want to demonstrate the business results to investors in the most exciting way. That's why RoamBI created mobile apps for iPhone and iPad, which allow to effectively visualize the data from SAP BusinessObjects BI and other BI systems.