SAP Business ByDesign Graduates From App To PlatformSAP Business ByDesign Graduates From App To Platform

As a data management platform, ByDesign is based on the same in-memory, column-store technology used in the SAP HANA appliance and earlier BusinessObjects Explorer and SAP BW Accelerator appliances. The key advantage in both HANA and ByDesign is real-time access to transactional data, an advantage SAP expects to bring to its entire applications portfolio as the technology is matured and scaled up.

These are exciting possibilities, but for now, SAP is being methodical about expanding ByDesign and exploiting the new SDK. The vendor has expanded the customer base in a controlled fashion from 100 with the launch of ByDesign 2.5 last July to roughly 250 today. Approximately 500 customers are expected to be on the platform by May, and SAP's goal is 1,000 by the end of this year.

You wouldn't see these nice round numbers unless SAP was acting as a gatekeeper rather than a come-one, come-all seller of subscription-based software.

"We're still in a mode where we'd rather be conservative and good retention of customers," said Horak. "We want to make sure they are happy and cover their needs as opposed to moving too quickly and getting into a churn situation."

Is SAP being too conservative? After all, Saleforce.com surpassed 80,000 customers in 2010, and more than 185,000 partner apps have been built on the CRM vendor's Force.com platform. One might say that, for now at least, ByDesign is to Salesforce.com as Windows Phone 7 is to iPhone.

SAP dismisses Salesforce.com as a CRM niche player, emphasizing the soup-to-nuts application breadth of the ByDesign suite and, thus, broader application potential for partner developers.

Other features worth mentioning in Feature Pack 2.6 include support for iPad tablets and RIM Blackberries. ByDesign already supported iPhone. The platform has also been extended to Austria, Switzerland and Canada with support for local currencies, languages, tax policies and regulations. The platform was previously available in China, France, Germany, India, the U. K. and the U.S.

A ByDesign 3.0 release is set for August. There's little doubt it will bring new functionality, new SDK flexibility and support for additional countries. But don't expect SAP to open the flood gates and stoke too much fervor for on-demand deployments.

Having an on-demand platform may be the key to the future. But in the here and now, SAP still has software to sell.