For several years, SAP has been moving away from its old model of developing everything itself. The familiar rallying cry at SAP conferences and on press calls always alludes to the perils of “The Stack” and “Consolidation.” Partners, partners, partners, SAP says, are the key to its customers’ success and to SAP’s domination in the enterprise software market.

With the release of Duet Enterprise last week, and of the Software Development Kit for Business ByDesign Monday, this strategy is starting to come full circle. In both instances, SAP has spent years and years developing the platform, and then looks to its partners to provide the content.

SAP will also use the Business ByDesign platform to build its line-of-business, on-demand applications for large companies, and use the App Store model to develop and sell add-ons for customers, according to Frank Ianotti, VP of SAP Business ByDesign, who leads all aspects of BYD’s go-to-market strategy in North America.

So it’s not hard to envision where this may take us next – an App Store for enterprise mobile content that allows SAP partners to build off the Sybase Unwired Platform, for example.

But how exactly these ERP App Stores will take shape is perhaps most interesting to speculate on. The idea holds a lot of promise – both for SAP’s business, the channel and, even more so, for its customers.

A familiar lament of SAP customers is that if they aren’t in the Preferred Customer Network or their development requests aren’t very big or are very small, they don’t fit into one of SAP’s existing influence buckets. There are lots of midsize development ideas, particularly around industry-specific functionality, that fall in between those extremes that would benefit many customers – but just not enough for SAP to spend the time and money developing it.

And in both of the above cases, even if those customers are successful in getting their ideas through, it’s not uncommon to hear that SAP takes too long to deliver on them.

SAP seems to be positioning the App Store concept as the middle ground between large development requests and OSS notes. And perhaps many customers can use this concept to get vertically-focused development requests that aren’t competitive differentiators, without everyone paying a premium for custom development.

Now, SAP’s user groups already have Influence Councils organized by product and industry that voice development requests to SAP. And last year, SUGEN launched an initiative to get greater visibility into the enhancements users were requesting globally. The hope was that it could push enhancements that work for many customers, not just the largest and most strategic ones. 

By leveraging that structure already in place, the App store idea could really take off. How could it work? Think a combination between IdeaPlace, a new website SAP’s trying out that allows users to weigh in and vote on small improvements, and EcoHub, where customers can search for partners who build them.

SAP’s planning to have more details on the App Store for Business ByDesign by CEBIT, which will be held in Germany the first week in March, and Sapphire/ASUG Annual Conference, held in May.

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