Citrix and SAP America Inc are bundling SAP Business One with Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server. The joint offering will enable the SMB organizations that use Business One to deploy the application suite to remote and mobile workers users as well as take advantage of centralized deployment and upgrades.
Although it is not a subscription-based hosted offering it is a move in that direction. In its marketing materials Citrix says: Our software gives people secure and well-managed access to business information wherever it lives – on demand.
The joint solution will be available via authorized partners in North America and the two companies are in the process of building a channel program based on joint Citrix and Business One resellers.
SAP entered the pay-as-you-go software market in October 2004 when SAP America and HP joined forces to offer mid-sized US companies a managed solution paid for in part through a fixed per-month, per-user-based fee. SAP provides its software and implementation services, plus maintenance, end-user training, support, functional management, and application management. HP hosts the solution from its data centers, and provides services including operations, infrastructure hosting, storage-on-demand, business recovery, managed Web solutions, and security.
The model differs from the traditional hosted model because it assumes license maintenance and implementation fees would be financed through the SAP Financing Program with the remaining services paid for on a monthly, per-user basis and at the end of the finance agreement, the customer owns the software and no more payments are due to SAP.
At the same time SAP launched a hosted sourcing platform plus complementary services for mySAP SRM.
