SAP Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now?

The first time Business ByDesign’s Feature Pack 2.5 was on display was at SAP’s Influencer Summit in Boston December last year. There were many blog posts covering it, for instance this one by Brian Sommer or this one by Michael Krigsman.

After that event there were a couple of questions which were left unanswered so I had a briefing with SAP executive Rainer Zinow (Senior Vice President for SME Strategic Solution Management) to get an update on the latest developments.

Reference customers:

Not much has changed since December.

Business ByDesign still has 100+ customers, and out of these around 50 are live. 50 or more will go live in the next months. All customers are now on Feature Pack 2.0 and 40 partner solutions are already integrated into ByD.

Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe AIR:

Adobe is the RIA of choice for larger enterprises for SAP, so why Microsoft’s Silverlight for ByD? 
With Feature Pack 2.5 (scheduled for release later this year), it was clear that ByD wanted to move away from an HTML based architecture. Some of the factors the ByD team looked at before deciding which platform to use were adoption rate, how fast the communities is growing and what is delivered out of the box.


The team felt that Silverlight is moving at a higher pace than Adobe, “Adobe never really took off”, and concluded that Silverlight is the industry leading standard. At least for the time being.


There were a couple of other factors which were important for choosing Silverlight. It had the best desktop feel and because the market recommended Visual Studio/.NET for the SDK, choosing Microsoft’s Silverlight seemed like a natural choice. Another advantage is of course the tight Microsoft Office integration.


It is however important to note that if Silverlight should disappear it would be a trivial piece to move to Adobe AIR.

The SDK:

The ByD SDK will be available in the second part of 2010.

Right now SAP is working with a few selected German partners, but will soon extend it to include a few US partners too. Some, but not all of these, are SAP partners.

Visual Studio was chosen as the development environment for the SDK. It was recommended to SAP and lets them tap into a big community of developers and partners which they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. SAP is hoping to attract new partners, but this is of course a bet they are making and it remains to be seen whether or not this was a wise move. I just hope SAP isn’t alienating too many of their current SME partners by introducing yet more tools, programming languages and IDEs to deal with.

The standard development language is C#, which is then converted to ABAP at runtime. We ABAP’ers we have a new word to learn: ABAPsl = ABAP scripting language. ABAP syntax and keywords can be used in this version of Visual Studio.

Adobe LiveCycle Designer is used for forms.

The new UI:

I agree with many of the comments I read from the Boston event that the new UI with Feature Pack 2.5 is a bit boring and 90ies looking. With ByD I feel that SAP finally had a chance to break away from SAP standard UI design and do something refreshing and new. Instead we get more of SAP’s usual blue screens.

Partners can and will be invited to reskin ByD.

But SAP will recommend that partners stick to standards and guidelines if they don’t have a reason to deviate from it. That way the end user will find it easier to get used to partner provided applications. There shouldn’t be a difference between an SAP delivered application and a partner delivered application.

14 Tweets

17 Responses to “SAP Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now?”

  1. SergioFerrari  on February 4th, 2010

    @yojibee lot of interesting comments to “Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now?” http://bit.ly/bVTtw2

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  2. dxs_1  on February 4th, 2010

    RT @yojibee: A wee Business ByDesign post: http://bit.ly/bVTtw2

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  3. pjtec  on February 3rd, 2010

    RT @barneybeal: RT @yojibee Blog post: “Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now?” http://bit.ly/bVTtw2

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  4. barneybeal  on February 3rd, 2010

    RT @yojibee Blog post: “Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now?” http://bit.ly/bVTtw2

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  5. SHOOSTHUIZEN  on February 3rd, 2010

    RT @ERPexpert: Good information on SAP Business ByDesign from @yojibee http://ow.ly/135hd > Interesting news about Silverlight and .Net

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  6. kalsing  on February 3rd, 2010

    SAP Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now? http://bit.ly/dcAkTd -> More commitment to Microsoft technologies.

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  7. TechDriven  on February 3rd, 2010

    RT @yojibee: A wee Business ByDesign post: http://bit.ly/bVTtw2

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  8. happel  on February 2nd, 2010

    RT @yojibee: A wee Business ByDesign post: http://bit.ly/bVTtw2

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  9. SAPProJournal  on February 2nd, 2010

    RT @ERPexpert: Good information on SAP Business ByDesign from @yojibee http://ow.ly/135hd “The ByD SDK will be available in the second p …

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  10. sig  on February 2nd, 2010

    RT @yojibee: A wee Business ByDesign post: http://bit.ly/bVTtw2 < Hepp, solid up-to-date that

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  11. ERPexpert  on February 2nd, 2010

    Good information on SAP Business ByDesign from @yojibee http://ow.ly/135hd “The ByD SDK will be available in the second part of 2010.”

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  12. Frank55  on February 2nd, 2010

    SAP Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now? http://bit.ly/aL8vlZ – by yojebee

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  13. jonerpnewsfeed  on February 2nd, 2010

    #news SAP Business ByDesign – Where Are We Now? http://bit.ly/aL8vlZ (via @jonerp)

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  14. yojibee  on February 2nd, 2010

    A wee Business ByDesign post: http://bit.ly/bVTtw2

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

  15. Sergio  on February 4th, 2010

    closing the door to some small Operating Systems like Linux, Mac OS, Google’s Chrome OS and to a tons of trendy devices like iPhone, iPad that do not support Silverlight ?
    It the same story of NetWeaver Business Client that runs only in Windows and for SAPgui where the windows version is really ahead to the Java and HTMl ones.

    “long life to the queen (Microsoft)”

    great post Anne

  16. Luca  on February 4th, 2010

    It is incredible that SAP might believe and sustain:
    “
It is however important to note that if Silverlight should disappear it would be a trivial piece to move to Adobe AIR.”
    SAP was not able to replace the very old ITS in so many years and customer needs to use webgui yet!
    I wait to see what will happen
    Thanks for with post.
    Luca

  17. Kristian Kalsing  on February 3rd, 2010

    All up, a strong commitment to Microsoft UI technologies.


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