SAP Anywhere goes nowhere, reaches commercial cul-de-sac

SAP Anywhere, the "complete front-office software package", is going nowhere quickly in Europe as the service has been closed to new customers.

The cloudy thing purported to manage SME customers’ e-commerce websites, their CRM, sales, order management, inventory and customer services from a single point.

But the German software firm has decided to wind down the business in the UK - where the European pilot had been running for the past year - a company spokeswoman confirmed.

“We made the decision to focus the go-to-market strategy of SAP Anywhere on the US market as well as mainland China for the next few years,” she confirmed.

“This means that in the UK and Ireland, the solution will no longer be commercially available, but we will continue to support all existing customers…from the US. If desired, we have also offered to support our customers to transition off the product,” she added.

SAP refused to tell us how many customers had bought the Anywhere cloud service, and said, "We are unable to disclose these figures as we do not break down adoption rates by specific product groups”.

The company mouthpiece said the “decision to narrow our focus” was “not made lightly, or due to any performance issues with the solutions. We do not plan on replacing it with any alternative solutions”.

Anywhere customers - there were some - contacted us to complain about the closure. One said his firm will need to “redevelop” the e-commerce site and seek a new point of sale system, and talked of taking legal advice with a view to suing for damages.

Some staff impacted by the decision have “chosen to stay at SAP” in alternative roles and other “decided that this is not the right path for them”. No numbers on the people that left or stayed were verified. ®