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Ask The CRM Expert: Questions & Answers

Moving from SAP CRM on-demand to SAP on-premise CRM

Moving from SAP CRM on-demand to SAP on-premise CRM

By  Srinivasa Katta, President and CEO, iServiceGlobe, Inc.

SearchCRM.com

We are a small business considering SAP on demand, but I'd like to keep the option open to move to an on-premise solution in the future if the company grows. Do you know of many companies who have made this switch? Is it typically driven by an increase in employees, or by increase in revenue? What differences can we expect between hosted and on-premise?
SAP CRM on demand was just released in February 2006, so I don't know of a customer who subscribed to SAP CRM on demand and has already switched to on premise. I do know that DuPont is running SAP CRM On-Demand with its on-premise SAP ERP system.

On demand will meet both an increase in employees and an increase in revenue, so there is no imperative need to switch to the on-premise solution to meet those increases. SAP on demand is a single tenancy model, as opposed to a multiple tenancy model. That means that SAP's on demand template for each customer is maintained on a separate database. This prevents across the board outages that may occur with a multi-tenancy model, where all customers are on the same server. The single tenancy model also provides an easy upgrade from on demand to on premise, should the customer decide to customize the application to meet their specific business requirements. Also, SAP CRM On-Demand software uses the same code as SAP CRM on premise. Hence the switch should be relatively easy.