Batting for the little guys: Panaya's progress
One of the thrills of attending an event is coming across a relatively small vendor that has something interesting to talk about and is doing good things.
Last week I ran into Amit Bendov, chief marketing officer of Panaya, a company that provides SaaS solutions for SAP customers undertaking upgrades. In a recent survey, (short registration required) Panaya found that:
- The average cost of SAP development and support across the surveyed organizations is $5,670 per user per year.
- On average, 70% of the cost goes towards in-house resources and 30% towards outsourcing.
- Overall cost is the top support-related challenge, as cited by 70% of the respondents.
- The effort involved in implementing Support Packages is quite considerable, reaching an average of 73 person days per support package, with the majority of the effort associated with testing (42
- days).
- When asked about their reaction to the recent changes in SAP’s Enterprise Support policy, the majority of the respondents (68%) do not think the price increase is reasonable. At the same time, a surprising 32% is either supportive of the price increase or neutral to it.
Ever since I stumbled across the company last year, I've liked both their story and vision of reducing the pain and cost of SAP customers that are upgrading. In the above video, I asked Amit to tell me what's happening with the company and how it is progressing. Highlights from the above video:
- Panaya has crossed the 150 customer line and counts Sony, Mercedes-Benz and Home Depot among its users.
- January 2010 will see a new release that takes its testing solution a step beyond discovery of likely breaks. In the upcoming release, Panaya will automatically fix around 70% of the issues it finds
- Some color on product pricing
- The elimination of unit testing and reduced regression testing
- How Panaya fits with the notion of agile development
- Scaling the business with Amazon's elastic cloud infrastructure
It's a good story and one that should cheer many an otherwise worried SAP customer.