As I’ve said, I like Joshua Greenbaum a lot - he does not get taken in by hype very easily. His latest blog post lends more credence to his intelligent skepticism. To summarize, he is critical of SAP’s ability to land $1bn in new businesses anchored by the new Business by Design (BBD) concept. And he points out that the SMB product will be aimed in a large way at subsidiaries of large businesses. So…essentially it is a product for small businesses, sold to large businesses…huh?

I understand the idea of BBD. But I think SAP is missing a major point here. Instead of making a value-based product that can be co-opted by any company, division, etc. they are pushing a limited product created with functionality that someone thought SMBs wanted. And pushing it decidedly NOT at SMBs but rather distributed enterprises (what large firm isn’t?).

By contrast, SugarCRM is deployed by all kinds of companies. Sure, we have Professional and Enterprise versions, but very large firms use Professional and smaller companies need things that are found in Sugar Enterprise.

I just don’t understand why a large company running the mySAP product (with its own unweildy abap code) would want to add yet another product line with yet another proprietary code base into its already complex IT stack.