Gartner recognises SAP Business All-in-One as a market leader

SCT Services, a local SAP Business All-in-One FMCG and Consumer Products Partner, has announced SAP Business All-in-One has been positioned by Gartner in the leaders quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for ERP for Product-Centric Midmarket Companies”. SAP Business All-in-One is recognised as a market leader for both its “ability to execute” and its “completeness of vision”.

According to the report, “Gartner sees this market as undergoing a major modernisation, by which established systems with deep functionality on older technology are being displaced by more modern and agile systems. These new systems enable users to be more agile in their responses to changing market conditions and to grasp new business opportunities faster.”

SCT Services CEO, Victor van der Watt, says the Gartner report shows that leaders are well-prepared to evolve their products to model-driven applications to allow for high flexibility, with tools for embedded analytics and interpretation of transactional data that allow for easy adoption by different types of users. “Leaders have compelling strategies for addressing the on-going market changes related to emerging technologies, such as SOA and BPPs.”

“They also have built structures to extend their systems with industry-specific solutions, often in cooperation with their partner ecosystem, which delivers the best support for the specific processes in vertical markets, while offering good enough support for the less-differentiating processes. Finally, leaders cultivate a broad and generally overwhelming level of customer satisfaction in a number of geographies and industries,” he explains.

According to the report, SAP Business All-in-One demonstrates a clear vision and the ability to execute against this vision. Midmarket ERP leaders like SAP Business All-in-One have deep and robust functionality that address a range of core user requirements. It says these vendors do have proven products as well as track records of customer success and demonstrated momentum in growing their market presence.

In addition, leading vendors have offerings that appeal to the specific process needs of midmarket customers, are straightforward and simple to use, and are designed or streamlined for low Total Cost of Ownership, while being available and well-supported in multiple regions.

Van der Watt points to the key changes in this market since the last publication of this Magic Quadrant. “Customers are starting to adopt the reworked user interfaces, which offer more role-based concepts, personalisation and collaboration features. The improved ease of use, extended search capabilities and more-integrated analytics features drive the use of ERP by more types of users, e.g., those that only occasionally access an ERP system to retrieve information or to complete business activities that used to be done manually.”

Furthermore, the interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based ERP is growing, but Gartner does not yet see a big adoption in core ERP. Most customers that were surveyed for this research continue to use their ERP solutions in an on-premises model, but they are starting to complement them by additional solutions in adjacent areas like CRM and collaboration. To react to this growing interest, vendors are creating hosted offerings with subscription models and administration services that offer some of the benefits of a SaaS ERP, but only a smaller number of vendors offers multi-tenant solutions.

“The report shows that many customers have reported that shortages in skilled and experienced resources for consulting and implementation created issues in their ERP implementation or deployment projects. To improve this situation, SCT Services has put a higher focus on improving the quality of resources. Rather than merely offering technical skills, deeper industry expertise, business consulting expertise and the acquisition of certifications are becoming important differentiating factors,” he explains.

SAP Business All-in-One is one of the broadest and deepest solutions in the market, and its Best Business Practices and the fast-start program reduce the effort needed for the early phases of an implementation. It is based on extensive experience from SAP’s large partner channel, which has turned their expertise into pre-packaged and pre-customised versions of SAP’s Business Suite.

More importantly, SAP Business All-in-One applications are pre-packaged, industry-specific solutions that use the traditional Large Enterprise SAP Business Suite functionality to support midmarket businesses. With pre-integrated Customer Relationship Management, Supplier Relationship Management and ERP functionality, SAP Business All-in-One is actually the SAP Business Suite product with a templatised deployment methodology, implemented by SAP partners.

Each partner remarkets and implements an industry-specific offering that uses a combination of SAP industry templates, as well as partner-specific templates, to configure a turnkey solution for the customer with fixed scope and implementation at a fixed price. This approach delivers the full scope of the underlying solution, not a reduced or trimmed solution, and helps to reduce the effort needed in the early phases of an implementation. Additional changes, enhancements and customisations, beyond simple configuration and “turning on” additional functions, are possible, but users doing so have to cope with the full complexity of the SAP Business Suite.

He says SAP’s recent development initiatives around Business All-in-One deliver improvements to the user experience via a new version of the NetWeaver Business Client and a deeper integration of the acquired BusinessObjects BI products. “Many of the enhancements and innovations delivered via the Business Suite become available in Business All-in-One, albeit with a certain delay that is used for streamlining and packaging activities. Examples include the addition of functionality originating from SAP’s Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) solution, of which parts like self-service procurement have been included.”

Gartner says from the perspective of global penetration, ability to scale, market share and SAP’s commitment to the solution, SAP Business All-in-One is one of the strongest solutions in the market. The price transparency delivered via SAP’s Solution Configurator has been expanded so that partners can include their individual offerings, scope and prices, which is a unique approach in the industry.

The combination of SAP’s undisputed leadership in the large enterprise market with the on-going efforts to enable smaller organisations to adopt the preconfigured packages makes SAP Business All-in-One one of only two products in the Leaders quadrant in this Magic Quadrant, with a specific fit for companies at the mid to upper end of the midmarket and for companies with very aggressive growth ambitions that need the scalability and functional strength of an enterprise-class solution.

SAP Business All-in-One offers rich functionality and a wide number of well-documented industry-specific best practices, which together address a wide range of requirements out of the box. SAP’s fast-start program aims at helping lower midsize enterprises to make the implementation easier and has proved its value in the early phases of an implementation project, e.g., system configuration, personalised demo and easier installation.

The “life-cycle workbench” for Business All-in-One solutions helps implementation experts define and manage an All-in-One solution by combing various tools like the solution configurator and builder, the installation wizard and the BusinessObjects Data Integrator for migrating data. It is fully integrated with SAP Solution Manager, and the BusinessObjects Edge server, which is used for the data migration, is used at no additional costs.

BusinessObjects Edge BI offers integrated analytics and dashboards throughout the application. “This is marketed as BI in SAP Business All-in-One and its pricing has been adjusted to be closer to the expectations of midmarket companies.

“Gartner believes that SAP Business All-in-One is best-suited for upper-midmarket companies or for fast-growing companies with demand for broad and deep specific functionality for a variety of industries,” he concludes.