SAP AG announced that its Business Suite 7 is generally available Tuesday, three months after the Walldorf, Germany-based software vendor unveiled the “library of business processes” designed to grant customers better insight into data and speed time to profit.
SAP had been ramping up customers with the new suite to ensure all works as it should in a live production environment, and it is now ready for general shipment, said Philip Say, vice-president of solution marketing for SAP ERP.
“We are successfully exiting that cycle and now we are entering what we describe as mass shipment of Business Suite 7,” said Say.
Business Suite 7, a library of best practices or, as SAP executive board member Jim Hagemann Snabe described it in February, “pre-defined end-to-end business processes,” packages more than 30 modular value scenarios that customers can deploy depending on the business challenge at hand. The value scenarios include Superior Customer Value and Product Lifecycle Management, for example.
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The value scenarios basically illustrate inter-relationships between SAP product capabilities using graphical guides and business terms, not feature and function lists. The customer can also see the associated systems impacted, and ultimately, the specific SAP modules that would need to be activated.
During the February unveiling, Léo Apotheker, co-CEO of SAP, said the suite responds to the need “to provide better and faster insight, higher level of efficiency” especially in tough economic times when businesses are scrutinizing IT spending.
SAP used the ramp-up period to test the value scenarios with a select group of customers who generally were satisfied with the software and continued through the program “from start to finish,” with only five per cent reporting any incidents with the software, said Say. The low number of incidents is a good sign, noted Say, considering “there was the risk that we believed was out there that many customers would carefully examine their IT budget and either postpone or terminate their ramp-up budgets with SAP.”
The majority of customers, nearly 54 per cent, in the ramp-up program were already SAP customers, which, according to Say, is “a signal to say SAP is an important piece of infrastructure for them ... many are expanding on the installation.”
Nearly 40 per cent of the ramp-up customers are greenfield installations, is a “healthy statistic for us,” said Say.
During the ramp-up period, SAP took the opportunity to scale up internal knowledge of how the software operates and build up support and consulting and partner teams, “so that once it hits (general availability), we have a critical mass of experts who are able to support the software.”
There is a partner certification program for Business Suite 7, within which SAP works with system integrators on the training of their consultants.
Apotheker also said the Suite will help organizations reduce cost by easing upgrades through enhancement packs that deliver new functionality in a synchronized release schedule for all SAP applications. This release offers more than 150 functional additions. However, Ray Wang, vice-president with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. noted that SAP might want to revisit its synchronized releases of all applications through periodic enhancement packs because the shift from “six to eight months for each enhancement package to one year needs to be re-examined in light of the quarterly pace of innovation found with the (software as a service) vendors.”
