In search of Business ByDesign: The NetWeaver 7.1 connection

SAP CEO Henning Kagermann detailed another key thread in the Business ByDesign delay: Developers need to move the software as a service application to the company's NetWeaver 7.1 platform if it is going to meet its costs targets

In an interview with the Enterprise Irregulars group of bloggers at SAP's Sapphire conference in Orlando, Kagermann offered up some additional detail about the Business ByDesign delay. The takeaway: SAP can't automate enough processes on the hosting side of the equation to standardize upgrades of Business ByDesign.

The NetWeaver connection had surfaced in an earlier discussion with SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker, who noted that NetWeaver, the company's Web services framework, would be key to delivering the necessary total cost of ownership (TCO).

Kagermann acknowledged the "tie between latest NetWeaver and Business ByDesign."

He added: "We know we can have TCO, but need NetWeaver enhancements. There's a very close link between the TCO of Business ByDesign and NetWeaver. The TCO is not so much hardware; There are too many processing steps in our hosting. We can continue to do manual steps when first upgrade Business ByDesign from 1.0 to 1.1, but it's not predictable in way where every client got it at once and in the same way."

He added that the current upgrade cycle takes too much time in hours and labor. NetWeaver 7.1 was detailed in October and its release notes claim that it better processing and integration features.