When it comes to business management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, SAP often isn’t on the radar for small and medium businesses (SMBs). But, while the ERP giant is best known for its large enterprise solutions, SAP Business One is aimed squarely at providing small businesses with a unified business management solution.
In this three-part series, I interview Luis Murguia, who was recently appointed Senior VP and general manager for SAP Business One to discuss how the solution fits into SAP’s strategy, what makes it a good fit for SMBs, and how the vendor plans to move Business One from being one of SAP’s best kept secret onto SMB short lists for ERP solutions.
In this first post, we discuss Luis’ background, Business One history, and some of the key differentiators it has in the SMB ERP market.
Laurie: Hi this is Laurie McCabe from SMB Group and today I’m talking to Luis Murguia, Senior VP and general manager for SAP Business One. Business One is SAP’s flagship ERP solution for small and medium businesses. So Luis you’re relatively new in this role, can you tell us a little bit about where you come from, and why you decided to become part of the Business One team at SAP.
Luis: Thank you Laurie, and great to catch up. I’ve been with SAP for 9 years, in the enterprise division as well as the partner organization. For the past 6 years, I ran SAP’s European partner organization. Throughout my career I have been involved with the ERP market. I started my career in providing ERP solutions for small wholesale food distributors, working with solutions like Peachtree, QuickBooks. Then I moved into selling HP3000 servers pre-loaded with business management software. So I’ve been involved in helping small business find new ways better ways to run the business and be more successful throughout my career.
Laurie: It sounds like you have a well-rounded history and in terms of small business solutions, which brings me to my next question. Many people think of SAP primarily as a big company a big company that sells sophisticated, high-end business solutions to other big companies. So what’s SAP’s role in small business?
Luis: Great question. Ben Horowitz, a venture capitalist that I admire a lot, was also a CEO of a start-up that became very successful in the dot-com crisis. He describes innovation as a really good idea that initially looks like a bad idea. This because any good idea that looks good off the bat is probably not innovative, as it s likely that many people are already doing it. For example manufacturing a car is a good idea because people need cars, but everybody knows it.
Laurie: So unless you’re like Tesla it’s not necessarily a new idea.
Luis: Exactly. 10 years ago people thought the idea of making a high performance car that runs 100% on electricity was such bad idea was no one was doing it. But then Tesla did it. Likewise, Business One, which is designed for small businesses, doesn’t appear to be a fit for SAP. But actually, we can leverage many SAP strengths, including industry knowledge and best practices, such as order to cash, and package it for small business. That’s what makes Business One such a novel and successful product. We instill and capture expertise from SAP’s big business ERP to help our smaller business customers be more competitive.
Laurie: Ok, explain a bit of the Business One history for us.
Luis: Business One has about 50,000 customers. The solution has been available for the last 15 years, and we are accelerating growth, adding close to 1500 new customers every quarter. Every day, about 15 new companies in the world choose Business One to manage the business.
Laurie: Why do you think growth is accelerating now?
Luis: I’ve been with Business One for just about four months, and I see two great takeaways to date. Number one is that Business One can be run in the customer’s own facilities, as well as in the cloud. Businesses like having this choice. The second reason, and perhaps more important, it is that more customers are choosing Business One because of the in-depth industry functionality that has been developed by our partner ecosystem.
Laurie: So is the focus for Business One to differentiate with industry specific versions or customizations?
Luis: That is 100% correct. And let’s talk a little bit about customer size segmentation too. We divide the Business One market into three distinct segments: companies with less than 50 employees, those with between 50-200 employees, and ones with 200 to 1,000 employees. The first, businesses with less than 50 employees will usually be running QuickBooks, as a standard off the shelf solution. In the 50 to 200 employee category, companies are probably using Microsoft Dynamics, Sage or another solution that they’ve customized to some extent, but they don’t have the critical mass to afford systems integrators to meet all of their requirements. Business One really fits the bill here, because we have over 600 micro-vertical customizations.
Laurie: So Business One has become a software development platform?
Luis: Yes, standard accounting, standard invoicing, management, sales, taxes, and other functionality is in there, and the ISV can build specific micro-vertical functionality on top of it–say for photo copier dealers or microbreweries, which have very different requirements. And in that 50-200 employee segment, that’s exactly what they need, a full solution to manage unique requirements, off the shelf. They can derive more value from a complete micro-vertical solution with Business One as the foundation.
Laurie: And having it available in the cloud probably helps a lot too.
Luis: Yes, in the US, over 85% of all new Business One customers are choosing cloud deployments. Many sign a contract a perpetual license from SAP for financial reasons, because most will stick with an ERP solution for a long time. It is much better, just like its better to own the house than renting the house–the math says you should buy not rent. But they are having partners run and manage Business One for them in the cloud. Say you are a microbrewery in Chicago. You don’t worry about servers, disasters or backups; you eliminate the traditional headaches associated with IT infrastructure. So even though many buy a perpetual license, all the infrastructure and management is in the cloud.
This post is the first of a three-part series. In the second, we’ll examine key triggers and requirements that drive small businesses to move from entry-level accounting solutions to SAP Business One. In the third, we’ll explore SAP’s Business One strategy and goals for the future.
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