Despite having pledged to cut development costs by around €100 million, German applications giant SAP has denied that it is reducing investment in its forthcoming software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering Business ByDesign.

In its recent financial report, SAP announced that Business ByDesign, a strategic foray into the mid-market, would be delayed by 12 months.

The reason given was that decelerating sales growth had forced the company to look at cost savings in order to protect profits. It would therefore spend €100 million less on making Business ByDesign than had been previously announced.

But, when quizzed by Information Age at the company's Sapphire user conference in Berlin, SAP flatly denied that this represented a reduction in investment, arguing instead that the move was simply a return to an earlier schedule.

“Let's start by getting some facts straight,” said co-CEO Leo Apotheker. “No-one is reducing any investment."

“We announced in January that we would accelerate investment in Business ByDesign,” he explained. “The decision made very recently is to continue investing in Business ByDesign but to take out that acceleration part and do it at the normal speed that we had planned originally. Therefore, we continue to invest significant resources, just not the accelerated part.”

Further reading

SAP rethinks software SAP’s on-demand applications offering, Business ByDesign, may turn the company into a mass market vendor

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