SAP Business One to receive multi-tenant cloud-savvy upgrade

Partners will now be able to sell a multi-tenant version of the ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for small companiesMulti-tenancy is a software architecture commonly used by SaaS (software-as-a-service) vendors, wherein multiple customers share the same instance of an application, but with their corporate data locked away from each other. This allows for operational cost savings over traditional hosting, and provides the ability to apply general product upgrades to many customers at once. "It's great to see that SAP realises that multi-tenancy is an important part of a cloud solution," said analyst Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research. "True multi-tenancy gives customers the lowest-cost delivery model and the quickest way to consume innovation." SAP rolling out cloud-savvy version of Business One Oracle releases Exalytics in-memory database to rival SAP HANA. SAP partners have already been selling Business One in hosted form. Last year, SAP instituted a policy change that made it easier for those companies to offer hosted Business One via subscription pricing. SAP is encouraging partners to sell Business One OnDemand by subscription as well, according to a statement. The engineering work on the multi-tenant version is complete, and it will become available from partners in the second quarter, according to SAP spokeswoman Angelika Pfahler. It will initially be offered in 18 countries, including the US, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, South Africa, Spain and Switzerland. Only SAP-certified hosting partners will be able to offer the application directly, although resellers that lack such qualifications can subcontract with a certified company, SAP said. Business One will continue to be available through traditional hosting and in on-premises form, under perpetual licence agreements. SAP also announced a version of its Business ByDesign cloud ERP suite, which is aimed at small and mid-sized companies and more recently, divisions of enterprises. SAP announced a version of ByDesign that includes industry-specific functionality for manufacturing, distribution and professional services companies.