Embarrassing! BuByDe is dead!

Lars Dalgaard, founder of SuccessFactors and former SAP-Member of the Board of Management for Cloud Computing, declared back in May 2012 the SAP–Product Business ByDesign (BuByDe) for dead. A few weeks later, E-3 illustrator Robert Platzgummer created a cartoon about this (for excerpts see this page, the original can be found in E-3 Magazine July/August 2012). In the E-3 October issue of this year, columnist no/name wrote: "There is a dear colleague of mine on the southern edge of the republic who, instead of the simple Business One with the B1i framework, has opted for Business ByDesign - cloud computing. Strategically, a hasard."

A few days later declared SAP-Board member and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Vishal Sikka, like his colleague Lars Dalgaard 18 months earlier, has been the Product BuByDe for dead. Only a small development team in India is supposed to take care of further development and support.

This means that not only the CIO of Hilti, on the southern edge of the republic, has a problem, but also around just under a thousand existing BuByDe customers worldwide who bet on the wrong horse. Our columnist no/name was the first to know, but of course too late for the few BuByDe customers who should have listened to cloud computing pioneer Lars Dalgaard. He already explained at Sapphire 2012 in Orlando the Product BuByDe for inadequate - at best, one could recycle some parts from it. His colleague on the Board Jim Hagemann Snabe immediately contradicted this portrayal and stated that BuByDe continues to be a strategic Product the SAP which ultimately says nothing about life or death.

In May 2012, Dalgaard's statement was still interpreted by analysts as an internal competence dispute between him and Vishal Sikka. Now Sikka himself had to announce defeat, thus confirming Dalgaard's visionary view. In this context, the role of IT analysts in the past 18 months appears interesting: Hardly anyone dared to utter the headline of the Robert Platzgummer illustration, "BuByDe is dead." Too powerful is SAP and too dependent the analyst scene to announce even uncomfortable truths for the benefit of existing customers: Still in this issue on page 32, Bo Lykkegaard, Research Director European Enterprise Application at IDC EMA, attempts to Product BuByDe to gloss over and justify Hilti's decision.

Not only the almost 1,000 existing BuByDe customers, including Hilti and DSAG e. V./GmbH, have lost out, but also the SAP-partner community. Numerous partners have invested a lot in BuByDe, some have even invested the entire Business model aligned with BuByDe. In the end, it didn't help because you can't buy SuccessFactors, appoint Lars Dalgaard as cloud computing CEO and market BuByDe at the same time. As far as cloud computing is concerned, beats SAP like a drowning man. That is no longer a strategy, but only despair. Now BuByDe is dead.