SAP Business ByDesign Becomes Real

[Katie]

SAP's Business ByDesign (ByD) on-demand product finally arrived to
much of the world this week. While quite late too market (the first
public launch announcement was made in NY over two years ago), and
after a few missteps and start-overs, the new cloud computing solution
looks interesting, and possibly promising. ByD is a multi-tenant CRM &
ERP product, hosted by IBM, available in the software as a service
(SaaS) model and priced from $89.00 per user per month for CRM to
$149/ user/month for ERP or their PSP (Professional Services Provider)
edition.

I've seen an early view of the product and while the user interface
leverage's Microsoft's new Silverlight technology, it doesn't really
lend toward ease of use. Perhaps this is just a result of their race
to get the product to market or just inherent to a version 1 release
(although they refer to it as Feature Pack, version 2.5, yesterday's
release is the first general availability release so I consider this a
version 1 product). At this point, the SaaS product is only available
in China, France, Germany, India, UK and US.

I'd appreciate any reviews or updates on this SaaS ERP and CRM product
as I suspect I'll be called upon by clients to provide comments or
consulting. Thanks.