The UK & Ireland SAP User Group says that its members are beginning to think about jumping to the cloud, with most believing they will end up using SAP’s offering. However the vast majority think that the firm has been slow to bring its offering to the market, and some even took offerings from rivals because of the delay.
The German firm has often been criticised for its slow approach to on-demand computing and this research confirms that its clients think the firm should have pushed into cloud computing earlier. Most (61%) of the SAP users quizzed said that they can see their organisation using SAP’s SaaS offerings in the future, with 49% planning to use SaaS or cloud computing in the next 12 – 18 months.
However, 73% believe that SAP has been too slow to bring its SaaS suite to market and 16% of respondents even said they ended up using another vendor’s technology in another area of their business because SAP did not have an appropriate SaaS offering for their needs, the survey said.
"It is clear that more users are now starting to consider SaaS as a way to deliver applications to their business" said Craig Dale, chief executive of the UK & Ireland SAP User Group. "Rightly or wrongly, SAP has been criticised for being slow to bring its SaaS offering to the market, but hopefully the result is a more robust and compelling offering."
SAP is ready to launch the latest version of Business ByDesign and Dale thinks that clients will embrace the new platform. "Following SAP’s recent announcement regarding its new Business ByDesign ERP suite, there will no doubt be a lot of renewed interest in software-as-a-service from SAP users. With any technology adoption, it is essential that you look before you leap. Therefore, in the coming months, and at this year’s annual user conference, we will be aiming to further educate our members on the pros and cons of SaaS as different organisations will have different business needs," he said.
SAP however, denied that it had been slow to market. "We truly believe we came to the marketplace early enough with SAP Business ByDesign. Innovation is more than just having great ideas and developing nice software. Innovation is only innovation when it is also implemented at the customer and being used productively. This is why we have been working with pilot customers until now to ensure the solution is robust and ready for volume business," said Tim Noble, managing director, SAP UK & Ireland.
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The survey spoke to 100 SAP user organisations in the UK and Ireland.
