SAP All-in-One gets improvements, customers |
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By Jon Franke, News Editor
09 Aug 2007 | SearchSAP.com |
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With much of the buzz around SAP and the midmarket focused on A1S, SAP this week announced upgrades to All-in-One and shared some news on the product's success.
SAP announced 60 new best practices for its All-in-One product. The best practices will be available to SAP partners to build products on top of them, as well as to SAP's own sales force. They come with software, business process configuration tools, implementation accelerators, product documentation and pre-sales demonstration scripts.
"This way, partners don't have to start from zero; a large portion of the work is done," said Tom Kindermans, senior vice president for SAP's SMB in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Asia). "Then they can tailor-make it for the customer or the micro-vertical they want to tackle."
SAP also announced that All-in-One reached the 10,000 customer milestone with the signing of U&M Mineração, a Brazilian engineering, heavy construction and mining contractor. There are currently 10,223 All-in-One customers in all.
Kindermans reported that All-in-One is growing its customer base at a rate of 25-40% per year, depending on the region, and anticipates continued strong growth, despite the impending release of SAP's A1S on-demand midmarket product.
"We have 10,000 All-in-One customers, but we continue to invest in the product as before," he said. "And we believe we will have the same growth in the next few years as we have had in the past few."
Of course, now that SAP will soon have three products aimed at the SMB market, there has been some confusion among customers and analysts. Kindermans shared a theory for some of the uncertainty.
"Some of the confusion comes from the codename we are using -- A1S -- for the new suite we announced," he said. "This created some confusion because some people believe A1S will be the successor of All-in-One, which is not the case. The real commercial name will be announced in September."
SAP continues to profess that each of its offerings touches a different part of the market -- On-premise Business One for small businesses and All-in-One for the upper end of the midmarket. Then the A1S on-demand product will target companies in the lower end of the midmarket that don't have complex vertical needs.
"We have to have clear positioning, that's for sure," Kindermans said. "But there is no overlap between the three solutions, and we absolutely need them all to cover the market."
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