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SAP AND SILVERLIGHT; BIG DEAL OR NOT?

Chris Horak, SAPSAP's need to rewrite its Business ByDesign user interface because of Microsoft's move away from Silverlight is an issue simmering in the background. But whether it is important or not is disputed by competitors. For rival Intacct, “This is just the latest miss-step in SAP’s journey to the cloud – their poor execution has all been driven by their DNA as direct seller of on-premises software to large enterprises," says Dan Druker, Intacct's VP of marketing

 

He said Silverlight was "just another bad technology decision" as SAP must rewrite the interface in HTML5. Chris Horak, global head of solution marketing for ByD, says the change is a nonissue. "It’s not a big deal," says Horak. SAP separated ByD’s application logic from how it is rendered to the browser and Horak adds, "If we were doing a paint or graphics program, we’d have to do some recalling, but we don’t use those functions." Horak said the rewrite will take a year. Druker contends it will be take two years to get to an HTML client. "What they’ve ended up with is a product that is vastly too complex for the mid-market – it takes four months to train a consultant - so now they have recast their ByD go to market strategy to focus on subsidiaries of their global 2000 customers," says Druker. (Maybe it is not appropriate to note Intacct’s many different distribution strategies and its four CEOs starting with founder David Thomas who left in 2004.) Long-time SAP observer Dennis Howlett pointed to ByD issues on his blog writing that, "SAP has realised that its solution is too 'big' for the very small market, despite having offered a variety of on ramping packages for businesses that can implement 10 users of (say) CRM." But Howlett downplayed the low number of users. He said the goal of 1,000 ByD customers by years' end had run into the European debt crisis, but SAP was countering that. "The one concern that remains but which may yet prove baseless is about SAP's ability to close out 1,000 customers by year's end, Howlett wrote. He also noted, "I spoke with a number of BYD customers who were more than happy to go on the record as satisfied with what the solution delivers."

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