I’ve just been talking to Dennis on the way back home from SAPPHIRE 07 in Atlanta, while he’s waiting in Madrid airport for the next plane home to Andalucía. It sounds like SAP did a great job of hosting the bloggers and giving them access to senior executives, so they could be grilled on strategy and the transition that’s happening inside the company. The blogging fraternity tend to know there stuff in much more depth than the typical journalist, and aren’t afraid of going for the throat with tough questions. However, it sounds like there was a lack of any real news, although Dennis was heartened by some of the technology innovations that he saw.
One key topic was the new A1S product - this is the newly developed solution that will be deployed on-demand, with a different business model to the traditional SAP products, and which is aimed at businesses of 50-500 employees in the SME space. Dennis has two good posts you should read on his discussions with Scott Lutz, SAP’s VP global SME go-to-market about the company’s A1S plans.
Nothing Dennis has uncovered changes my views on wondering how the new model is going to sit alongside SAP’s existing business without cannibalising it. In fact, I’ve got two more key questions that I now want to ask when I’m in Vienna for the European flavour of the event:
- If there are already 150 customers trialling A1S, why can’t we see the product yet? You would have thought they would at least be able to give us a demo in controlled circumstances. Dennis had a fine, but unprintable quote on what a tease this is. However, the vacuum makes me wonder if there is anything to hide?
- At CeBIT Henning Kagerman said that SAP would grow from 39,000 customers now to 100,000 by 2010, but that 50,000 of those customers were expected to be using B1, one of SAP’s other SME products. Dennis tells me B1 wasn’t mentioned at the conference. I might expect them to be talking about dramatic growth for A1S, although as I’ve said, I still have a problem believing the new business model will work inside the current SAP. I can’t see how they are going to get such dramatic growth in B1, with no announcements or talk of it at this show. How do these numbers add up?
Roll on Vienna, when we may have more answers, and certainly more stories from SAP customers.
