SAP Business ByDesign – Not Halting, but Advancing to Next Generation Platform

SAP has once again reaffirmed that ByDesign is here to stay, despite yet another round of competitors making up “sunset” fantasies based on rumor.

We certainly feel that it’s reasonable to change the development lifecycle on a product that already offers more out-of-the-box functionality than its competitors, with even more on the way. In fact, we see tremendous potential based on recent announcements, and there are many reasons why:

Common Platform

As we’ve already seen tremendous growth and quick adoption of the HANA Cloud Platform, ByDesign only stands to benefit as the improvement of this platform is accelerated by its commonality with other applications, including Business Suite, which already has a growing customer base on the HANA Cloud. While the SMB market often doesn’t have the deep pockets to fund “perfection”, large enterprises often have both the desire and the resources. This rising tide of improvements will lift all the ships, ByDesign being one of the many that we anticipate for the future.

Moving to HTML/SAPUI5

While the current Silverlight User Interface fulfilled what was necessary, the User Interface will only get better and easier to use once the move is made to HTML/JavaScript/CSS. We’ve already received a taste of what is to come with SAPUI5 (as it has been implemented for portions of Business Suite through Fiori, with more on the way) – and it is truly a next-generation User Interface – which is a far-cry from others that look and feel like they were built in 1998. While customers may be concerned that these User Interface improvements might negatively affect performance, we believe it will make for a better user experience as shown in the next example.

Performance

Along with all ByDesign users, we’re anticipating significant performance improvements. In fact, we’ve already seen a small portion of what’s possible with a customization that FMT built for one of our clients. Here’s the example:

The client needed to update several hundred Project Task schedules, as well as the Remaining Work for several thousand Work Packages. Anyone who’s used ByDesign Project Management has an idea of how long it would take to load the information through the Silverlight UI – well, our custom front-end loaded the full list of several hundred Project Tasks and several thousand Work Packages in 20 seconds. Use of an HTML/CSS front-end with JavaScript-based data formatting and AJAX-based Read/Write allowed for instantaneous user input with basic validation, while the ByDesign Web Services built for the Project Management module retained the ability to send back updates with full standard data validation – so even potential problems with the front-end wouldnever affect the back-end data integrity. This is the performance we foresee.

Mobility

The SAPUI5 transition will make use of ByDesign through mobile even better, as these technologies include native mobile-focused development capabilities. We’re looking forward to expanded use of ByDesign on mobile platforms, opening up broader possibilities for different business use-cases with mobile scenarios.

Customization

As development partners, we’re certainly excited to continue participation in the SAP ByDesign partner ecosystem. Even as of now, it’s extremely easy to make basic customer-specific deployments – once we have the requirements, all we need is a Test Tenant URL, Username, and Password to connect to a client’s system and get to work. The ByDesign SDK is built to keep customizations correctly segregated from standard system functionality, so there’s no chance of an errant line of code breaking core functions. As SAP applies best practices methodology to the customization lifecycle, we’re not concerned about the ongoing maintenance nightmares often seen with customizations to other systems.

Quicker Development Cycle

The movement to a hot-fix based approach towards new functionality and improvements is certainly welcome – we anticipate that we should actually see a shorter turnaround between requested functionality and implementation.

New Applications and Integrations

The HANA Cloud platform will be shared by many solutions, and we foresee new applications being developed from which ByDesign will only benefit. We’re expecting that an application developed with intent towards use with one solution on the HANA Cloud can easily be ported to integrate with ByDesign, as they will share the same platform, and same integration methodology. The expansion of the shared pool of applications created by third party providers will enhance the SAP store experience. This will in turn benefit customers and partners. Customers will find the features and functions required to run their businesses in the cloud more efficient and cost effective. Partners will see their custom built applications made available to a much larger ecosystem of products.

Partner Verticals and Industry Specific Solutions

Along with new applications being developed on the HANA Cloud, we anticipate partners creating verticals and industry specific solutions that, in addition to ByDesign, have the potential to integrate with any application on the HANA Cloud platform. This will open the door for ByDesign to be compatible with industries it could never thrive in before. We foresee this being a great opportunity for partners to leverage their industry specific experience to build applications in the HANA Cloud. This gives customers confidence that when they purchase SAP in the Cloud, they are purchasing a whole ecosystem of applications and verticals that will be available to benefit their business.

Knowledge Capital

ByDesign is transitioning to use technologies that are commonly used and well understood – while hundreds of people understood ByDesign and the SDK, tens or hundreds of thousands are familiar with the common technologies that ByDesign will be moving towards (HTML, Java, JavaScript, CSS). Additionally, we stand to benefit from the knowledge capital gained by people working with other applications in the HANA Cloud space; that is, what they learn from other areas can be applied to ByDesign. This shift of resources by SAP makes perfect sense. Instead of having two groups working on two sets of identical features for different products, combine them to work on one set of features that both products will benefit from.

Branding

While some customers may not be concerned with the exact look of the application, the movement towards CSS represents a massive increase in flexibility to the look of the user interface, including the ability to make an entirely custom theme. We foresee that customers will be able to truly make ByDesign look and feel unique to their company without risk of breaking features or functionality.

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