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SAP: from words to actions with SaaS

After a renewed cloud mobile strategy was introduced to the public in October, SAP took the next step and specifically demonstrated how they are implementing these plans. SAP is no longer a supplier in the market, despite its size, as SAP’s primary activities are in the sector of applied business solutions. The company’s product portfolio, however, comprises a great deal of platform-specialized software. Consequently, this initially implies that the primary activity of the company will comply with the challenge of a SaaS pattern (software as a service) in the age of cloud computing.

It is precisely the development of service patterns which the last news conference was devoted to in late November. SAP displayed their first results in their SAP Subscription Hosting software in Russia and the CIS. The company’s key partners, as invitees, also contributed to the news conference giving a talk about their experience.

While explaining the goals and objectives of this software, Igor Bogachev, Chief Executive Officer of SAP in the CIS, singled out a cloud model of customer service as the foundation upon which the whole IT market is developing, and all categories of customers are likely to use this product, regardless of the size and sector of the company. But when it comes to the SaaS pattern itself, there is no doubt that small and medium-sized businesses are the main targets. Thus, it is clear that SaaS development has become very important for SAP, since it provides both the company and its partners with the opportunity to enter the small and medium-sized business market. Frankly, it is where SAP’s powerful solutions have thus far enjoyed good local success. This trend is also important to expand the regional presence of the company, including the CIS. Maksim Matiash, SAP’s Regional Executive in Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, has noted that Ukraine’s economic advance is directly associated with the successful activity of small and medium-sized enterprises, so there is currently great demand for effective methods of business management support.

According to SAP’s spokesmen, the SAP Subscription Hosting program involves major partners with extensive experience in the introduction and development of company solutions. Five companies were the first to provide results: Bl Partner, Lanit, Softline and T-Systems of Russia, and KM Ware of Ukraine (a member of the international holding company KM Core, formerly known as “Kvazar-Micro”). From watching the brief presentation from all of these companies, one may conclude that all are still at the early stages of development. Actually, the accessibility of their services in the market was announced only in the middle of this year. One could count the amount of customers for each project on one hand. Nevertheless, even this is a good starting point, although it should be noted that “1C” and its partner community are now working very widely with the cloud. The solution providers presented their calculations of the project key parameters: the introduction cost varies from $40,000-300,000, in a time of 6–12 weeks and a rental price of $6-12 for one subscriber per day.

Perhaps KM Ware’s SaaS solution, shown at the meeting, could be the best presented SAP solutions-based cloud project in the CIS. Incidentally, iqClinic, one of Kyiv’s leading commercial medical facilities, is one of the subscribers to KM Ware’s program. The system is based on the SAP Health2People solution (itself based on SAP Business All-in-One) and contains an entire set of integrated software applications, from the call centre to the internal accounting system. According to Rostislav Valikhnovskiy, Chair of iqClinic, such an approach has made it possible to integrate all the departments of the clinic into a unified information space, provide a uniform accounting management system with a full range of services and treatments that eliminate the gaps in cash transactions, reduce a number of errors and loss of data, and analyze performance efficiency of the clinic, either as a whole or of each of its departments, in real-time. Thanks to the cloud model, the implementation of SAP’s ERP-system in iqClinic was accomplished in record time, from September to October 2011.

Viktor Yermak, KM Ware Business Development Executive, shared his comments on this project in his role as a supplier. He mentioned that cloud computing not only saves time, money and resources, but also provides a higher level of service and security: “The advantage of this model is that it eliminates one of the most challenging development phases – installing and configuring the customer’s IT-infrastructure and servers. Instead, a customer gains access to the solution developed at a qualified data centre and is free to use the functions and components of the ERP system, which are indispensable for important business activities. The total cost of ownership is reduced accordingly: instead of a large-scale initial investment into the purchase of licenses, additional software and various IT equipment, as well as further systematic costs associated with ERP system support and management, a customer only pays a monthly fee to access selected functions”.

Source: PC Week