OFFERING ERP SOLUTIONS AS ONLINE SERVICES
Aki Lassila
Software Business Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, P.O.Box 5500, FI-02015 TKK, Espoo, Finland
Keywords: Software as a Service, business model, enterprise resource planning, value networks, online service.
Abstract: The differences between product and service business are considerable and the change of focus in a firm’s
business model from one to the other is not easy to accomplish. The objective of this paper is to study how a
software product company specialised in developing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications can
use the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model to expand its business. To software companies who
provide SaaS services, SaaS offers e.g. lowered production and distribution costs, more predictable cash
flows, and shortened sales cycle. However, in order to be able to successfully offer SaaS services the
providers have to overcome the potential risks associated with e.g. scalability, reliability, and partner
management. In this case study we concentrate on SAP and examine how the SaaS model can be
implemented by an ERP software company. Our findings include that SAP has successfully leveraged its
market leader position with its SaaS offering and expanded its customer base in the SME markets with the
help of its partner network. SAP has also been able to cope with the problems associated with SaaS and
managed to take advantage of the SaaS model’s benefits.
1 INTRODUCTION
The differences between product and service
business are considerable and the change of focus in
a firm’s business model from one to the other is not
easy to accomplish (see e.g. Hoch, D. et al. 1999,
Nambisan 2001, Cusumano 2003). For example, the
scale economies, which are associated with product
business (and especially with information goods),
are not easily achieved in service business.
Furthermore, the economies of scope (e.g. applying
domain area how-to knowledge) are harder to take
advantage of in the product business as they usually
e.g. increase the complexity of the software
development (Nambisan 2001). The Software as a
Service (SaaS) business model attempts to bridge the
gap between the software product and service
business in order for the software companies to
provide online services to their customers (SIIA
2001, Hoch, F. et al. 2001, TripleTree 2004,
Sääksjärvi et al. 2005). The SaaS model tries to
provide answers on how the software firms can at
the same time achieve the above-mentioned
economies of scale, economies of scope, and fulfil
customers’ requirements for customisation to suit
their business needs at the same time. The purpose
of this paper is to study how a software product
company can successfully adopt a more service-
oriented business model and by doing so increase
the number of its customers and access new markets
with the help of its partners.
The objective of this exploratory and descriptive
research study is to address the above-mentioned
issues and propose different ways of how they can
be solved. We use a case study, which is centred on
one particular domain area, namely Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP), to illustrate how one
particular software company has leveraged its
domain area knowledge (which is associated with
scope economies), expanded its customer base
(enjoying from economies of scale benefits),
customised its SaaS service offering to suit its
partners’ and customers’ needs, and also leveraged
the complementary resources of its partners in
creating a packaged service offering (benefiting
from economies of aggregation). The case company
that we studied was the ERP software market leader
SAP, which has operated in the ERP (product)
business since 1972, and its SaaS offering. In this
paper we define ERP software as a firm-wide
information system that integrates key business
processes so that information can flow freely
between different parts of the firm (Laudon and
Laudon 2002), are very complex applications and
implementing them requires large investments of
money, time, and expertise (Davenport 1998). In
66
Lassila A. (2006).
OFFERING ERP SOLUTIONS AS ONLINE SERVICES.
In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and
e-Government / e-Learning, pages 66-73
DOI: 10.5220/0001248000660073
Copyright
c
SciTePress
addition, offering ERP software as an online service
is complicated since it requires the integration of a
range of business processes and information systems
that are vital to the customer (Ekanayaka et al. 2002,
Guah and Currie 2004). Therefore, offering ERP
software as a service is an interesting case to study.
1.1 Structure of the Paper
The paper is structured as follows. We begin by
introducing the framework that was used in this
study. Next, we review the case study’s research
methodology and in section four we present the
overview of the case company and its SaaS offering.
In section five the findings from the case study are
analysed. The final section is for discussion of the
results and also our conclusions and suggestions for
future research are presented.
2 FRAMEWORK
The framework of this study consists of the Software
as a Service business model (Cherry Tree 2000,
SIIA 2001, Hoch, F. et al. 2001, Sääksjärvi et al.
2005) and Amit and Zott’s value driver model (Amit
and Zott 2001). These models are the building
blocks that form the theoretical background of this
paper and are used as the lenses via which the case
study’s findings are analysed.
2.1 Software as a Service
The Software as a Service is a relatively new
concept although the origins of the SaaS business
model can be traced back to the time-sharing
services (Walsh 2003, Kern et al. 2002). The SaaS
model moves the focus from owning the software to
using the software as it examines the service aspect
of the software business and ways for the software
companies to offer a new value proposition to their
customers by moving away from the product-based
approach to software procurement to more service-
oriented one (SIIA 2001, Hoch, F. et al. 2001,
Ekanayaka et al. 2002, TripleTree 2004, Sääksjärvi
et al. 2005). Some of the proposed SaaS benefits for
the customers include that SaaS enables them to
focus on core competencies, offers easier access to
technical expertise, reduced implementation time,
scalability, and economic access to valuable
software applications at anytime and from anyplace
(Cherry Tree 2000, SIIA 2001, Hoch, F. et al. 2001,
Ekanayaka 2002, Kern et al. 2002, Walsh 2003). For
the SaaS providers, the proposed benefits of offering
SaaS services includes e.g. scale economies in both
production and distribution costs, expansion of the
potential customer base, more predictable cash
flows, and shortened sales cycle (Cherry Tree 2000,
SIIA 2001, Kern et al. 2002, Walsh 2003). We have
summarised the SaaS model’s benefits and risks
from the SaaS providers’ viewpoint in Table 1.
A white paper of the SIIA introduced the term
“Software as a Service” (SIIA 2001, Hoch, F. et al.
2001). SIIA’s aim was to change the perspective
from outsourcing to that of network-based services
by exploring and identifying important issues and
critical success factors for the Independent Software
Vendors (ISVs) seeking to introduce new online
services. Among the important issues that SIIA
reviewed were the new skills and resources needed
by the ISVs in order to be able to ”SaaS enable”
their existing products. This could e.g. mean
building new versions of their software products
and/or forming partnerships in order to create their
SaaS offering. SIIA (2001) and others (Cherry Tree
2000, Ekanayaka et al. 2003, Walsh 2003,
Sääksjärvi et al. 2005) have emphasized that the
ability to manage partnerships will be important
amongst the new set of skills needed by SaaS
providers because even the largest companies will
have difficulties in providing and managing all of
the components needed in creating SaaS solutions.
We propose that instead of the limited
outsourcing perspective, the SaaS business model
should be understood as a one-to-many e-commerce
arrangement dealing with digital products (see e.g.
Shapiro and Varian 1999 for a more thorough
discussion on digital products). We define SaaS as
follows: “Software as a Service is time and location
independent online access to a remotely managed
server application, that permits concurrent utilisation
of the same application installation by a large
number of independent users (customers), offers an
attractive payment logic compared to the customer
value received, and makes a continuous flow of new
and innovative software possible” (Sääksjärvi et al.
2005). SaaS services, which are also called web
services (Currie 2004), are said to be the next
generation of Application Service Provision (ASP)
services (Cherry Tree 2000, SIIA 2001, TripleTree
2004). The most important differences between the
SaaS and the “old” ASP model are that: 1) SaaS
applies an e-commerce point-of-view instead of the
ASP model's outsourcing view, 2) the SaaS model
emphasizes the capability and need to (mass)
customise customer solutions, and 3) SaaS is a
coherent business model concerned with value
creation and value appropriation whereas ASP is
more of a technical definition (Lassila 2005).
OFFERING ERP SOLUTIONS AS ONLINE SERVICES
67
More and more ISVs (not only ERP software
companies) are implementing the SaaS business
model and slowly changing their focus from
product-based business (where the customer owns
the application software and delivery infrastructure)
to providing software-based services (where the
customer “rents” the application and the SaaS
provider manages the delivery infrastructure).
However, creating a successful SaaS offering will
require more concrete models of e.g. how the issues
related to networking are managed (Gulati et al.
2000, Dyer et al. 2001), how the necessary scale
economies can be reached (performance and
scalability issues of applications need to be resolved
while meeting the customer requirements for
integration and customisation see e.g. Cherry Tree
2000, Hoch, F. et al. 2001, Susarla et al. 2003,
Walsh 2003, Guah and Currie 2004), and how the
continuous flow of product innovations i.e. novelty
for the customers (Amit and Zott 2001, Utterback
1994) could be arranged. All in all, these
observations make the SaaS model very challenging
and some of the literature has probably
underestimated the difficulties and risks (SIIA 2001,
Walsh 2003, TripleTree 2004) caused by the SaaS
model’s requirement for the firms to be able to
transform their software product business into online
service business (Nambisan 2001, Cusumano 2003,
Currie 2004, Sääksjärvi et al. 2005). However, it has
to be noted that for some ISVs the SaaS model is
more of a new sale or distribution channel and does
not mean a complete overhaul of the company's
strategy. For a software company with an existing
customer base (such as SAP), the key questions
revolve around bringing software services to market
with a minimum of disruption to current sales and
distribution channels and achieving a maximum
additive effect on sales.
2.2 Value Drivers
The value driver model of Amit and Zott enables the
evaluation of the value creation potential of different
business models through four value drivers:
efficiency, complementaries, lock-in, and novelty. In
this paper these four value drivers are used to review
and analyse the case firm and its SaaS service
offering.
Amit and Zott’s (2001) value creation model is
based on the virtual markets “in which business
transactions are conducted via open networks based
on the fixed and wireless Internet infrastructure”.
According to Amit and Zott, several characteristics
of the virtual markets, such as the ease of extending
one’s product or service range to include
complementary products, improved access to
complementary resources and capabilities, and new
forms of collaboration among firms, have an
enormous effect on how value can be created. Value
creation opportunities in virtual markets may arise
e.g. from new ways to combine information goods,
physical products and services, and integration of
resources and capabilities among partners.
Furthermore, the network-based value perspective of
Amit and Zott’s model provides a good background
to explore and explain the driving forces behind the
SaaS providers’ reasons for partnering and the
factors that affect these partnerships.
Table 1: The benefits and risks of the SaaS model for the provider (Sääksjärvi et al. 2005).
Benefits for the SaaS provider Risks for the SaaS provider
1. SaaS enables economies of scale in production
and distribution (one-to many offering)
1. It is difficult to manage the complex network of
suppliers, which is required for integrating the
product and service businesses
2. The cash flows from SaaS are more predictable
than in traditional software sales (recurring revenue)
2. Moving to the SaaS model initially reduces the
turnover as the revenue comes from service fees
instead of license sales
3. SaaS expands the potential customer base 3. Performance and scalability issues are to be
expected, depending on the technical solution used
4. The sales cycle of SaaS services is shorter than
that of traditional software sales
4. High initial investment in starting the SaaS
business (building and maintaining the required IT
infrastructure and costs of buying 3rd party software)
5. SaaS lowers version management and
maintenance costs
5. The customisation of the SaaS applications
typically incurs extra costs
6. By successfully integrating products and
services into a SaaS offering, provider creates
barriers to entry for competitors
6. Requires commitment to a more frequent
release/upgrade cycle
WEBIST 2006 - SOCIETY, E-BUSINESS AND E-GOVERNMENT
68
The value creation model is based on the value
chain framework (Porter 1985), the theory of
creative destruction (Schumpeter 1942), the
resource-based view (Barney 1991), strategic
network theory (e.g. Dyer and Singh 1998, Gulati et
al. 2000) and transaction cost economics
(Williamson 1975). Amit and Zott (2001) emphasize
the distinction between a business model and a
revenue model: the business model primarily refers
to value creation whereas the revenue model is
centred on value appropriation. By the term “value”
Amit and Zott refer to the total value created for all
parties involved in the network that the firm’s
business model compasses. The four value drivers
help in assessing the total value that can be
appropriated by the participants of a particular firm’s
business model i.e. in this case SAP and its
partners/complementors, and their customers.
In Amit and Zott’s model the most important
value driver is efficiency. Efficiency enhancements
include e.g. reduction of transaction costs,
achievement of scale and scope economies,
reduction of search costs etc. Another source of
value creation are complementaries, which are
present whenever having a bundle of goods together
provides more value than the total value of having
each of the goods separately (for a more thorough
discussion on bundling and economies of
aggregation see e.g. Bakos and Brynjolfsson 1999).
Business models can also create value by
capitalising on complementaries among activities
e.g. when firms co-operate and create a SaaS
offering together. The virtual markets open new
value creation possibilities since new relational
capabilities, skills, and assets (i.e. shared resources)
between firms can be exploited e.g. between online
and offline capabilities in order to create sustainable
advantage.
According to Amit and Zott (2001), the value-
creating potential of a business model depends also
on the extent of which it is able to engage customers
to repeat transactions and this value driver is called
the lock-in. Lock-in usually refers to the switching
costs faced by clients who consider alternative
services or products from other firms. Lock-in
includes e.g. customer loyalty programs,
customisation, and branding. The fourth value
driver, novelty, consists of new ways of conducting
transactions, new product or service innovations, or
new ways of combining products and services (as in
the case of the SaaS business model). Usually the
four value drivers and their effects are interrelated
with one another.
3 CASE STUDY
This exploratory research study follows the
interpretive approach to qualitative research as we
conduct a case study and analyse the findings using
Klein and Myers’s proposed set of principles (Klein
and Myers 1999) in conducting our research.
The case study’s unit of analysis is the SAP’s
SaaS business model, which we think provides
useful insights for other software companies on how
to create a successful SaaS offering. In this case
study we wish to explore 1) how a company with an
existing customer base can start offering SaaS
services, 2) expand its customers base with the help
of its partners, 3) overcome the problems associated
with SaaS, and 4) take advantage of the benefits of
the SaaS business model. Our propositions were
reviewed earlier in section two were the framework
was presented. The earlier presented framework is
used as the criteria with which the case study’s
findings are analysed.
For this case study information was gathered via
interviews and discussions with SAP’s employees
and partners. In addition, information was also
gathered from newspapers and trade journals, web-
based news services, and from the company’s own
communication materials such as annual and
quarterly reports, press releases, product
descriptions, and own web pages.
4 SAP AND ITS SAAS OFFERING
SAP was founded in 1972 and its headquarters are in
Walldorf, Germany. SAP has operations in more
than 50 countries and the company is listed on
several stock exchanges, including the Frankfurt
stock exchange and NYSE. In, SAP established a
specialised subsidiary called SAP Hosting, which
specialises in operating and managing SAP solutions
in order to be “a flexible hosting provider and ASP
for SAP” (SAP 2000). Currently SAP Hosting
operates over 300 SAP systems for their customers,
employs around 375 staff, and supports more than
130,000 users in four data centres in Germany and
the United States (SAP 2005a). SAP Hosting’s
customer base ranges from “midsize firms right
through to the TOP 500 companies in the world”
(SAP 2005a). For reference, SAP Group’s and SAP
Hosting’s essential financial figures are shown in
Table 2. The figures in Table 2. should be read with
caution since they are somewhat misleading because
SAP has stated in its annual reports that “portion of
SAP’s external hosting revenue is not included here
but in the revenue numbers of the subsidiaries,
which sell the services to the customers of SAP”.
OFFERING ERP SOLUTIONS AS ONLINE SERVICES
69
This means that part of SAP’s SaaS revenues are
reported in the SAP Group’s product and service
revenues and do not show up in the SAP Hosting’s
financials. Furthermore, IDC estimated that in 2003,
SAP’s SaaS revenue was 53.4 million dollars (note
that it was twice the figure that SAP Hosting
reported) representing 24 per cent growth from
2002, which placed SAP the eight largest amongst
the worldwide Top 10 SaaS providers (e.g.
Salesforce.com and Oracle being fourth and fifth
respectively, Mizoras 2004). This being the case, it
is not possible to draw very accurate conclusions
from these financial figures although it is certain that
the SaaS services still represent only a very small
portion of the whole SAP Group’s revenues.
However, from these figures we can see the trend
that SAP’s SaaS business has grown faster than
either total, product, or service revenues and that
business has been profitable with the exception of
2002, which was financially a bad year for the whole
SAP Group.
4.1 Offering ERP Software as a
Service
From 2000 onwards, SAP has offered its mySAP
ERP software as a service via SAP Hosting and via
its SaaS partner and reseller network. Following the
SAP Group’s market segmentation strategy, the SAP
Hosting targets its SaaS offering towards the
medium-sized and large, Top 500 companies in
order to avoid or lessen the channel conflict with its
SaaS partners. SAP’s SaaS partners include ACS,
Corio, CSC, and USInternetworking. In Figure 1. we
present an overview of the SAP’s SaaS business
model.
Figure 1: SAP's SaaS business model.
In order to create its own mySAP SaaS offering,
SAP uses e.g. HP as its IT infrastructure provider.
The SAP’s SaaS offering consists of the mySAP
Business Suite, which includes Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship
Management (CRM), Product Lifecycle
Management, Supplier Relationship Management
(SRM), and Supply Chain Management (SCM)
applications. These are further divided into
functional modules, which include e.g. Sales &
Distribution (SD), Material Management (MM),
ERP Financials, and ERP HR. From these modules
the customers can select the services they want to
purchase. It is also possible for the customers to
provide and maintain some of the mySAP
functionality by themselves and buy only some parts
of their ERP solution as a SaaS service from the
SAP or SAP’s SaaS partners.
For a relatively small monthly subscription fee
(compared to the high ERP product license and
Table 2: SAP Group’s and SAP Hosting’s financial figures 2000-05 (source: SAP’s annual reports).
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
SAP Group (in millions of €)
Total revenue 6,264 7,341 7,413 7,024 7,515
Rev. increase % 23% 17% 1% -5% 7%
Product revenue 2,459 2,581 2,291 2,148 2,361
Prod. increase % 27% 5% -11% -6% 10%
Service revenue 2,045 2,549 2,618 2,252 2,273
Serv. increase % 5% 25% 3% -14% 1%
Net income 616 581 509 1,077 1,311
Return on sales 16% 15% 15% 25% 28%
Employees 24,177 28,410 28,797 29,610 32,205
SAP Hosting (in thousands of €)
Revenue 6,038 12,702 15,410 27,611 45,696
Rev. increase - 110.3% 21.3% 79.2% 65.5%
Net income 531 1,192 -4,705 409 3,766
Return on sales 8.8% 9.4% -30.5% 1,5% 8.2%
Employees 54 71 115 113 220
WEBIST 2006 - SOCIETY, E-BUSINESS AND E-GOVERNMENT
70
implementation costs), the SaaS customers can
subscribe to these mySAP SaaS services. The
customer fee is usually per customer (end user) per
month based subscription fee, which depends on the
amount of functionality and customisation of the
SaaS service. The SAP’s SaaS revenue model is
straightforward: SAP Hosting receives recurring
revenue from its own customers and SaaS partners
pay either the mySAP software license fee (which
depends on the chosen functionality and modules) or
the partner and SAP sign a revenue sharing
arrangement.
It has to be also noted that the SAP’s SaaS
partners usually do not offer the whole range of the
Business Suite’s functionality, instead they are
usually concentrating on offering only some of the
modules of the Suite to suit a certain customer
segment’s needs. In addition, the SAP’s partners
usually offer also other companies’ software as a
service and integration and customisation services
for these as well. The complexity of the ERP
software makes offering it as a service difficult. The
number of possible combinations of functionality
and features the SaaS customers can choose, what
their ERP SaaS service consists of, and how it is
implemented is very high. That is why SAP and its
SaaS partners also offer consultation services. These
consultation services usually include design and
planning, integration, customisation,
implementation, and training services in order to
create and offer the customer an ERP solution that
suits their needs. Implementing an ERP solution can
be an extremely complex task especially if the
amount of functionality is high and customer’s
customisation requirements are numerous. This
makes ERP software’s suitability for SaaS services a
very challenging task: how to productise the service
offering and reach economies of scale while still
fulfilling the customers’ customisation
requirements? Usually this problem is handled by
the SaaS providers by limiting the number of
mySAP modules they offer and by offering only
limited customisation features. Naturally the
complexity also affects the implementation time
since a plain vanilla ERP solution with very little
customisation can be more quickly be put in use by
the SaaS customer and it also costs less.
Unfortunately, these plain vanilla solutions often do
not suit the customer’s needs and requirements
regarding e.g. integration.
5 CASE STUDY’S FINDINGS
For SAP, the SaaS business model has been
successful: SAP has been able to increase its sales,
international operations, and customer base
profitably without having to make huge investments
e.g. in different countries’ sales and support
personnel. The case study’s findings in light of the
value creation model are summarised in Table 3.
Furthermore, SAP has been able to capture all of
the previously listed benefits of the SaaS business
model (see Table 1.) except for the item number six
because SAP especially wants other companies to
also offer mySAP-based SaaS services. This is part
of SAP’s overall strategy of growing its partners,
complementors, and resellers business as well as its
own at the same time. As the market leader, SAP has
over 50 per cent share of the overall ERP software
market and it has chosen the growth strategy of
growing with its partners (see e.g. Hoch, D. et al.
1999 and Gawer and Cusumano 2002).
SAP has also taken advantage of its domain area
how-to knowledge and succeeded in offering its
mySAP Business Suite as a service to a wider
customer base through its SaaS partners and
resellers. In essence, SAP has managed to reach
economies of scale while taking advantage of
economies of scope i.e. its ERP software can now be
offered to and used by a larger number of customer
companies. This has been made possible by SAP,
which has successfully combined its own product-
based business with its partners’ service business
related skills and assets. By enabling its partners to
sell mySAP SaaS services, SAP has also lowered its
costs associated with sales, distribution,
customisation, and customer support (SAP’s
partners handle them) and also started receiving
recurring revenue.
In addition, the risks associated with the SaaS
model have also been successfully dealt with. SAP
has downplayed the possible channel conflicts and
selected partners (such as HP as its IT infrastructure
provider) that complement its own skills, resources,
and e.g. geographical coverage. Also, the underlying
technology of mySAP software makes it a scalable,
web-enabled application and therefore suitable for
online services. Furthermore, instead of (initially)
reducing revenue due to the adoption of the SaaS
model, SAP has increased its software license sales
through its partners and expanded its potential
customer base successfully to the SMEs, which are a
lucrative market for the big ERP software
companies.
To summarise, even though offering ERP
software as a service is a complex matter SAP has
successfully taken advantage of the SaaS business
model’s benefits and has managed to downplay the
associated risks. Also the SAP’s SaaS partners and
resellers have benefited from their complementary
skills and assets in creating a bundled service
offering.
OFFERING ERP SOLUTIONS AS ONLINE SERVICES
71
Although this case study concentrated on only
one company and its SaaS offering, the results of
this case study can be said to be generalisable on the
analytical level (level-1 inference), which is
commonplace with case studies (Yin 2003).
According to Lee and Baskerville’s generalisability
framework, this research study’s findings would fall
into the category of generalising from data to
description (Lee and Baskerville 2003).
6 DISCUSSION AND
CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of this paper was to study how a
software product company can use the Software as a
Service model to expand its business. We conducted
a case study of SAP and its SaaS offering and found
out that by successfully managing to solve or avoid
the associated risks and by taking advantage of the
SaaS model’s benefits SAP managed to increase its
sales, potential customer base, and started receiving
recurring revenue. Furthermore, also SAP’s SaaS
partners have benefited from the usage of the SaaS
model. However, it needs to be said that for SAP, its
SaaS service offering is more of an additional sale
and distribution channel and does not represent a
major renewal of the company's strategy.
On the basis of this study, we can say that the
SaaS business model can be a very successful part of
a large software firm’s strategy, especially when its
primary markets are saturated (the very large, top
500 companies already have ERP systems in place).
In addition, on the basis of our analysis we think that
instead of just concentrating on efficiency
improvements, the sustainable way to generate value
using the SaaS model is to provide easy and low-
cost access to useful software applications, based on
a broader set of value sources i.e. complementaries,
novelty, and lock-in.
In conclusion, since this study concentrated only
on exploring the SAP’s and its partners’ SaaS
offerings, the generalisability and transferability of
our findings are limited. Therefore, further studies
should be conducted in order to study SAP‘s SaaS
customers, SAP’s SaaS partners, and also different
vertical segments where ERP software is used in
order to gather a more comprehensive view on the
SaaS ecosystem that has evolved around the
platform leader SAP. Also, in order to gain more
extensive and detailed understanding of the SaaS
business model and its implications to the software
companies in general, also other software companies
and their SaaS offerings, preferably in different
application domain areas, should be investigated.
REFERENCES
Amit, R. and Zott, C., 2001. Value Creation in E-business.
Strategic Management Journal, 22(6/7), 493-520.
Bakos, Y. and Brynjolfsson, E., 1999. Bundling
Information Goods: Pricing, Profits, and Efficiency.
Management Science, 45(12), 1613-1630.
Table 3: Sources of value creation in SAP’s SaaS offering.
Efficiency Complementaries Lock-in Novelty
1. Scale economies: lower
distribution and marketing
costs of SW, lower
customer support and
billing costs
1. Bundling offers
economies of aggregation:
enables brand leveraging of
the SAP and local, domain-
area knowledge of partners
1. Co-branded, tailored
ERP offering to suit both
the SaaS partners’ and
SaaS customers’ needs and
requirements
1. ERP as a service offering
via SAP’s own and
partners’ sales and delivery
channels
2. Scope economies: SAP
provides ERP
implementation how-to
knowledge to a larger
audience
2. One-stop shopping: ERP
software and
implementation plus
hosting and maintenance.
2. High-volume repeat
transactions: recurring
revenue from joint ventures
and SaaS partners’
customers
2. SMEs are now able to
select an affordable mySAP
ERP service to suit their
needs
3. Provides an easy, low
cost, and low risk access to
new markets of SMEs
3. Reduced search
(efficiency related
offering): SAP’s partners
act as the sales and
distribution channel
3. Efficiency features and
complementary service
offering both attracts and
retains customers
4. SAP and its partners can
focus on their own core
competencies
4. SAP benefits from its
ERP software market
leader’s advantage and
positive feedback effects
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