iServe, a subsidiary of the listed ERP.com which focuses exclusively on SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) products for small businesses, has announced the first South African client to make use of ERP through application service provision (ASP).
[VIDEO]Omnigraphics, a printing business within the Real Africa Durolink group, is to use the system as part of a bid to turn around a business that was unprofitable in 1999. The company`s management blames growth and outdated IT systems for its loss, and hopes to correct that with the SAP implementation.
iServe says implementing the system for Omnigraphics could take four to five months, as some development is needed to customise the solution for the printing industry, even though it claims a normal roll-out time of between six and eight weeks.
[VIDEO]UUNet SA will provide the backbone and data centre for the ASP offering, while Ariel Enterprise Systems will supply the Sun hardware in a pay-per-user deal iServe says spreads the risk around and negates the need for it to make a massive capital investment.
"Instead of building our own data centre, which would not be on par with UUNet`s, and investing in the hardware, we opted to partner with [UUNet and Ariel] to share the risk," says iServe director Johann Myburgh.
[VIDEO]iServe hopes to provide ERP software to 500 or more seats by the end of next year, and will target the small and medium enterprise (SME) market of companies with 50 users or less and an annual turnover of between R100 million and R300 million.
The 50-user cut-off would usually be where customers are offered a hosted or full on-site ERP solution, iServe says.
[VIDEO]"After you have more than 50 users, the cost of ownership swings the other way and it isn`t really cost-effective to use ASP anymore," Myburgh says.
Interacting with the software as a thin-client, with the actual SAP software located at a central hosting point, iServe estimates the cost to be around R3 000 per user at the top end of a sliding scale. That excludes bandwidth costs, which it says would not be significantly above that which a small company would normally require.
[VIDEO]Siemens Business Services and debis IT services are also accredited SAP ASP operators, but SAP ASP manager for Africa, Chris Holden, says no other clients have been signed to the service as yet.
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