Mature but making bold moves: the future of SAP Business One

SAP Business One is more than 20 years old, but far from past its prime—instead, the company is ushering in a new era of innovation that will benefit SMBs for many years to come. We take a closer look at what experts say about the future of SAP and how you can benefit.

SAP Business One is on a trajectory to build on its existing success and become an even more flexible and agile Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) platform for small business.

That’s the conclusion of trusted industry analysts Mint Jutras whose report ‘SAP Business One: The Next 20 Years’ paints a picture of a company that has come a long way but has its best years ahead.

The report’s author, Cindy Jutras—a widely recognised expert in analysing the impact of enterprise applications—writes, “SAP Business One is a mature solution. But unlike many of its competitors of similar vintage, it has continued to evolve over the years.”

Trail-blazing a platform approach

Central to that evolution is SAP’s plans to make its Business One solution more relevant and useful for small to medium businesses of all kinds by embedding features that make it more configurable, open to innovation and easily deployed.

As the Mint Jutras report states, “SAP Business One is becoming more than just an ERP. It is becoming a business process platform. That means it will be open, extensible, and poised to meet very specific needs across many different verticals….and fully capable of being delivered through the cloud as a service.”

SAP Business One is transforming into a platform that enables SMBs to easily build a suite of specialised functions on top of the strong foundation of a highly functional, well-built ERP.

In this way, an individual business can create a unique and customised ecosystem of software, in which multiple ‘building blocks’ can be added, combined, and subtracted as needed, without weakening the integrity or security of the underlying core ERP.

This move is seen as more than a superficial repositioning, as some vendors have attempted in the past. Rather, Jutras believes SAP is driven by a genuine understanding of the needs of smaller enterprises and a commitment to satisfying those needs.

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Investing heavily in flexible features

Mint Jutras’ report flags SAP’s continued strong investment in the development of its core ERP, from the foundational architecture and code, through to the user experience—as well as plans to improve mobility and embed analytical capabilities.  

These improvements will make life better for small to medium enterprises that use SAP Business One, putting the most efficient and user-friendly technologies for business management at their fingertips.

In particular, Jutras highlights an area where SAP Business One will stand apart in the coming years is through its planned investment in its code. In this regard, there are two major changes that will make SAP Business One a matchless ERP for smaller enterprises:

1. Improvements to architecture that enables SAP’s hundreds of independent software partners to develop extensions and API integrations that will broaden the scope of features SAP Business One users can access, without costly and invasive customisation. For instance, add-ons that perform very specific functions for verticals such as food and beverage, manufacturing and agriculture management.
2. Refactoring the SAP Business One code to make it a fully multi-tenancy SaaS, so that customers share the software’s essential resources (while maintaining the privacy and security of their configuration and data). This will ensure that as SAP continues to develop and improve their code into the future, users automatically benefit from applied updates—which makes keeping your software up-to-date more effortless.  

[CLIENT STORY – The power of software designed to scale: why medical distributors W9 chose SAP Business One]

Towards a brighter future

A simplified and more open platform that’s easier to make your own as you benefit from continuous improvement: that’s the future that SAP Business One customers can look forward to.

For small to medium businesses looking to use technology to be more agile and capitalise on opportunities for growth borne out of new channels, tools and digital products—SAP Business One has the vision to help you truly benefit from digital transformation, underpinned by an exceptional ERP.

Start a conversation with our friendly consultants to explore the current and future potential of SAP Business One as part of your digital transformation.