SAP Ups the Ante in the SMB Game

Yesterday SAP announced the general availability in the US of its SAP Anywhere solution. It is "specifically designed to help meet the e-commerce and customer interaction needs of small businesses with 10 to 200 employees".

SAP Anywhere is a fully cloud-based solution that covers all front-office (i.e. customer facing) processes of running a business from inventory via sales to customer service, including mobile PoS capabilities. This includes multi channel commerce and -marketing. It is purpose built from the ground up instead of being a 'slimmed-down' enterprise solution.

In an emphasis on its ecosystem strategy SAP directly partnered up with Google and Paypal to facilitate digital marketing and payment integration. The mobile first approach seems to come directly out of Microsoft's playbook.

Being targeted towards SMBs SAP boasts a setup time of 40 hours, i.e. one work week.

My PoV

While it is hard to count the number of (not so successful) approaches that SAP did into the SMB market SAP Anywhere seems to be a different thing with a claim of having already 500+ customers in China, where they started the go-to-market. It is also the first really serious attempt to get into the smaller side of the SMB market, after trying Business One, Business by Design, All-in-One etc., which mostly were attractive to the (upper) medium sized market.

The solution targets the, especially for smaller retailers, notoriously difficult space between marketing, CRM, PoS and e-commerce, where one often sees a raft of poorly or not integrated applications, which makes marketing difficult. Along with the promised extensibility his makes it a very interesting proposition, especially if there is a good feature fit, which remains to be seen.

The main challenge will lie in the fact that there regularly is a PoS system and more often than not a 'CRM' database of sorts.

With the enterprise market being saturated SAP now seems to take serious steps into the the market of smaller businesses that is so far covered by the likes of Netsuite and Sage et. al., while SAP still has a reputation of being difficult and complicated. Given reasonable pricing and a hopefully easy setup this solution can have quite a future.

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