Sightings in SaaS

Posts Tagged ‘SAP’

I read this article yesterday about SAP’s recent update to prospects, analysts and press about their new SaaS offering and it took me a bit to digest. How is this possible that you can screw this up so monstrously when you are one of the largest software vendors in the world?

One reason is that SAP was always an application company and what they know really well are business processes, the backbone of business applications. Thousands of the world’s largest companies run on SAP and you cannot this away from them.  But when you are creating a new SaaS service you have to not only think about the applications, but the database and the overall system architecture differently, and for a company that never ran a data center this was apparently a bridge too far.

But it’s not like SAP was the first into this market. Their were literally dozens of SaaS providers by the time that SAP stepped into the fray. But apparently none of them provided any guidance or wisdom to SAP when they made decisions about how to do a SaaS offering.

That they screwed it up royal is not a joke. It’s a sad truth. Nothing would give the SaaS model more credibility than an offering from SAP. NetSuite’s CEO Zach Nelson has often said that he knew a large competitor would announce a SaaS offering and then fail to deliver, validating the market and then not delivering all in the same graceful fall down the stairs. But, as I was kidding a friend the other day, it’s almost like they are doing it on purpose at this point. By not delivering and having as many issues as they have, are they causing the market to question the viability of SaaS?

Well, that’s madness, plain and simple, but what else can you say about a product launch this poor? It’s hard to compute. But I have learned never to underestimate the sheer arrogance of people, especially after having ridden a 20 year wave of success. Is it possible that we could be wrong? You stop asking this question at some point in the ride that SAP enjoyed.