A new offering this week from NetSuite called SuiteCloud Connect for
SAP lets users connect NetSuite data to their existing SAP systems.
This way, NetSuite is essentially targeting those SAP users.
It’s an offering that is being sold to customers as a palatable
software-as-a-service approach in this cost-cutting climate. One
analyst suggested that SAP could have done the same thing with its own
foundering on-demand ERP tool Business ByDesign, except it was marketed
quite differently: for first-time customers looking for a new SaaS
offering.
It sounds like, while an offering can render an array of
capabilities and benefits, its success can be largely due to how it’s
marketed, and to which of those capabilities is chosen as the
“flagship” capability to get the spotlight.
With the economic downturn, vendors are increasingly marketing their
products as scalable, and offering them in a modular fashion that can
augmented when funds or the need becomes available, or reduced when
utilization is low. It’s fitting considering the necessity to move away
from the long-term and resource-demanding deployment that can only
render a delayed return on investment.
The massive ERP implementation is not so hot nowadays, and SAP ERP
implementations have earned negative sentiments, having been described
as monolithic, over-budget, over-schedule. I read somewhere (I forget
where exactly) where an industry observer noted that customers always
had the option to buy SAP piecemeal, except it was never marketed that
way. But, I guess, perhaps now, that modular option will be one of the
features deemed more appropriate to this climate, and will get pushed
to the fore.
