SAP to Extend Country Road Map, Offer Solution Development Kit for SAP Business ByDesign Solution

Press release:

SAP to Extend Country Road Map, Offer Solution Development Kit for SAP Business ByDesign Solution

SAP NEWSBYTE - July 26, 2012 | SAP - Cloud Computing

SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the second 2012 release of the SAP Business ByDesign solution. The cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution is moving to a quarterly release cycle and is scheduled for availability in four additional countries: Denmark, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. The announcement follows the news of the company's largest SAP Business ByDesign customer win to date with the New South Wales Department of Trade & Investment in Australia.

Additionally, a software development kit (SDK) for SAP Business ByDesign will enable partners and customers to extend solution functionality and build one-off cases for customer-specific requirements. As part of the kit, SAP will provide developers with various capabilities, including Web services, which will allow the newly created partner add-on to exchange information with existing SAP or third-party cloud applications. Reusable building blocks — so called templates — will enable partners to create customer-specific add-ons much faster. Improved usability, including advanced documentation and examples, will help partners understand and start working with the SDK instantly — reducing the need for extensive training. More than 20 partners have already signed the contract, which enables them to begin working with the SDK.

To address increased customer and partner interest in creating country-specific content, SAP will also provide a localization kit to help them fulfill specific local requirements. Some customers have already started to use the kit to build additional country versions for their subsidiaries.

Co-innovation with customers and partners is a key part of the design process of cloud solutions from SAP. To help facilitate this approach, SAP installed an idea forum a year and a half ago for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with a global forum in English following about six month later. The forum serves as an easy-to-use and highly impactful tool for customers and partners to provide requests and ideas for additional functionality. Out of a total of 1,400 entries, SAP has realized 800 and plans to make more available with the new version of SAP Business ByDesign, including:

• Additional services, manufacturing and distribution functionality: Service industry enhancements, including improved ability to combine both products and services on projects, which links material in sales orders to project tasks. Through this extended functionality, SAP Business ByDesign is planned to support service industries outside of the professional service core. The extended ability to sell service contracts supporting billing, service level agreements, execution and escalations are intended to provide greater support for managed services agreements common in IT, media, marketing and other consulting services. Planned enhancements for manufacturing and distribution include support for customers that manage and track onsite and in-house repair scenarios.
• Mobile extensibility: SAP intends to enable key users able to customize the view for processes within SAP Business ByDesign on their preferred mobile devices. This will extend the existing standard support for over 15 mobile scenarios, including time and expense, customer relationship management (CRM) and reporting.

To learn more, visit the Cloud Computing page on sap.com and the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.