| July 30, 2007 - James Niccolai, IDG News
Service. SAP is showing a new version of its Business One
software to channel partners on Monday, an important step toward
the general release of the product later this year.
Business One is SAP's software for small businesses -- those
with less than 100 employees. It aims to cover all of a
company's basic needs, including financial management, sales,
inventory, and human resources, and is used by almost 15,000
customers around the world, according to SAP.
The upgrade, called Business One 2007, will add some
functionality in areas such as financial management and
e-commerce, but the main focus has been on polishing the
existing features and simplifying the product to make it easier
for SAP's channel partners to implement, said Niels Stenfeldt,
SAP vice president for Business One.
Business One is sold only through the channel, so making it
attractive to partners is important for SAP. The company is
showing the new software at a partner conference in Washington,
D.C., on Monday, where it also announced that it has signed 26
new Business One partners in the United States.
The Web-based CRM software that SAP bought from Praxis
Software last year will now been integrated into the core
Business One product instead of sold as a separate add-on. The
pricing won't change, but the integration will make it easier
for partners to implement, Stenfeldt said.
For end customers, SAP has overhauled a tool in the finance
application for reconciling incoming and outgoing payments. It
wasn't well designed in the current version of the product,
Stenfeldt admitted. SAP has now unified the process for
reconciling data from documents and general ledger transactions,
in place of the two separate processes that it had before.
The upgrade also includes new printing options, so that
layouts can be exported to Adobe Systems' PDF format and
e-mailed more easily, and several other updates.
Business One 2007 is being tested by partners now and should
be generally available in November or December, Stenfeldt said.
SAP Business One, along with SAP All-in-One, the company's
midmarket product, are both important for SAP, which hopes to
attract a high volume of smaller customers to offset slower
growth in the enterprise market.
Simon Jacobson, a senior analyst with AMR Research, said
Business One is "a very good alternative for customers that
don't want a software-as-a-service product like NetSuite, or who
want more functionality than you get from QuickBooks or some of
the Sage products."
Business One also competes with Microsoft's Dynamics
applications. And it might soon have a competitor at SAP, when
the company releases its A1S on-demand ERP offering early next
year.
For now it appears to be doing well. Business One had 14,667
customers at the end of the second quarter, up 38 percent from
the same time a year earlier, according to SAP. All-in-One, for
companies with up to 2,500 employees, had 10,223 customers, up
19 percent from last year, SAP said.
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