Of the four end users on the mid-market customer panel held during SAP’s recent Sapphire conference, three said they had not heard of ESA or SOA before arriving at the event, despite the line-up including three R/3-based users and one Business One user.

I don’t know what we can do with it, said Robert Jan van Duijne, CEO of Majestic Product BV, the first time I heard of it was today. The sentiment was echoed by Jeremy Dahan, marketing manager of Globe Diffusion and Roger Barker finance director of Muntons plc.

It was hardly heartening news for SAP who has spent considerable resources on promoting and explaining ESA for the past two to three years. It also indicates that its SMB strategy still needs tuning. Competitors will no doubt see it as evidence that SAP does not understand the SMB market.

CEO Henning Kagermann was not fazed by the result. The mid-market is not new to us…we are the market leader in the mid-market. Last year we increased our share against out competitors, so we have momentum. We have also invested in the products, he said, citing work on micro-verticals where the aim is to deliver applications they are already 90% to 95% ready.

We have seen many lean suites in mid-market situations where the simple solution did not help them grow. We can offer a SAP [vertical] solution because most of the expense is in the implementation not the software. With a vertical solution you take a lot of the cost out, he added.

Despite their lack of prior awareness, the panel liked what they heard at Sapphire and were not put off by fears of complexity. Barker is likely to adopt SOA when it hits its upgrade window in 2007, while Mike Konig, head of IT at Otto Bock Healthcare was keen on the idea of moving from modular silos to a process approach. If the company has the processes, it has the tools to improve the business, he argued, so that is why we are going to follow this strategy.

SAP has also invested in its indirect channel, he added, and it is this, rather than its vertical efforts, that appear to be paying off, with the panel crediting their local suppliers for their SAP knowledge and their willingness to recommend a system they originally thought was out of their league.

Rather than being worried by the lack of knowledge about ESA, Kagermann dismissed the issue, noting that it takes a few Sapphires for the message to get through. We try to give examples of why our approach to SOA will not increase complexity, while the approach used by other companies will.

Meanwhile it is stepping up its efforts to remove barriers and simplify the move to SOA, addressing the issue of how to consume SOA as well as its boosting its work on SOA provisioning. As part of that initiative, it has announced plans to establish SME Solution Centres, specifically to help mid-market companies. Located in the Americas, EMEA, and AsiaPac regions, each center will work with local partners to develop and qualify industry solutions with a view to generating a set of fast, predictable and easy-to-deploy systems that can be readily adapted and include built-in industry expertise.

The centers will build localized systems based on SAP Best Practises, which include methodology, documentation and preconfigured end-to-end business scenarios, designed to support predictable implementation time and cost for small and medium-sized companies.