How SAP can hit the 100,000 customer mark by 2010

Recently SAP released its third enhancement package for SAP ERP. SAP began releasing these enhancement packages about two years ago. Since then, by offering free upgrade packages that offer industry-specific business processes, Waldorf has been fine-tuning SAP ERP 6.0 in an attempt to cater to the needs of all businesses.

Analyst Ray Wang of Forrester Research explains why so many customers have upgraded to ERP 6.0: “New functionality, progression to service-oriented architecture and enhancement packages provide significant incentives to upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0.”

That being said, will SAP acquire 100,000 customers by 2010? AMR estimates that SAP has nearly 45,000 customers to date, so the odds are not looking very good at the moment. The SMB space is critical and could be SAP’s savior in this regard, but all the chips seem to be placed on Business ByDesign. “It would be quite a challenge,” Wang says, “without a Business ByDesign or SMB offering that SAP can scale quickly. But will they be able to scale Business ByDesign in time?”

For SAP, that’s the billion-dollar question.

Eric Samuels, Assitant Site Editor