Daily PLM Think Tank Blog

6 Responses to SAP Business By Design

1. Mark Holman says:

   May 21, 2009 at 9:02 pm

   First comment: The link to the article didn’t work (at least for me).

   Second: SAP is a case study in how not to approach SaaS. I hear Hasso Plattner speak ~18 months ago and he talked about having something like 2000 engineers on the project. I knew right away they were doomed. Arena built a full functional PLM SaaS solution with approximately 1% the headcount. Also, the biggest challenge for classic software companies isn’t actually the engineering and operations piece of SaaS (although not trivial), it’s being able to sustain two competing business models for your finance teams, sales teams, and marketing teams. Inevitably, the organization rejects/fights the new model, hides it from their “real customers” and it limps along. Few larger companies have succeeded on this, SAP has failed spectacularly. As for PLM, Arena has shown the model works, interestingly Oracle killed off the on-demand piece of Agile after the acquisition. Not clear that the traditional PLM providers will embrace SaaS, or let it live through the incubation period.
2. olegshilovitsky says:

   May 21, 2009 at 9:12 pm

   Mark, first try these links:
   http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/05/16/sap-and-business-by-design/
   http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=3689
   I agree with you. This is exactly what Stephen Arnold mentioned in his blog – both model probably won’t work.
   I cannot say, Arena is in incubation period – they exists 8-9 years.
   Thanks for your comments.
   -Oleg/
3. Mark Holman says:

   May 21, 2009 at 9:20 pm

   Thanks.

   On the incubation period, I meant the traditional providers (UGS, Dassault, Autodesk, Oracle, etc.) won’t let a SaaS model survive in their own company (if they ever got started. I agree Arena is way past incubation (founded in 2000, hundreds of customers) — although Agile tried hard to competitively kill them off for years.
4. olegshilovitsky says:

   May 21, 2009 at 9:30 pm

   so, from your standpoint Agile tried to kill Arena for years and after self-destroyed?
5. Mark Holman says:

   May 21, 2009 at 9:37 pm

   Not sure that they self destructed due to attempting to kill off Arena. I think there were many causes, but it did lead them into developing multiple different offerings, multiple teams, and a distracted approach to the market.
6. olegshilovitsky says:

   May 21, 2009 at 9:40 pm

   Mark, this is interesting experience. So what is the leading approach with SaaS PLM offering in your view? Is it different from best practices of on-premise implementations? Thanks. Oleg.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Not published)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of follow-up comments via email.