SAP’s Business ByDesign has proven to be a key to success for Pinkberry Ventures, an LA-based frozen yogurt chain founded in 2005 and doubling its size year-to-year, says Pinkberry Business Systems Analyst Judson Wickham. When the company was launched, “we were looking for an affordable business management platform that could scale with our growth,” he told Siliconangle.com Founder and CEO John Furrier in a live webcast from SAPhire 2011 on www.siliconangle.tv.

Because it needs to track finances from multiple retail sites – 20 of its own and 100 franchisees worldwide so far with another 100 franchisees expected to join over the next year – it outgrew Quickbooks, the traditional small business bookkeeping platform which, however, scales poorly to multiple sites, quickly. As result, he said, Pinkberry was one of the first actual users on SAP’s cloud service platform, Business ByDesign. It has been a happy relationship.

One thing that makes Wickham happy is that SAP has proven responsive to Pinkberry’s feature requests. “It is unusual for large ERP vendors to listen to SMB customers like that, but SAP has implementing things that we have requested,” says the former PoepleSoft system admin.

Also, he says, the Business ByDesign platform has proven easy and relatively inexpensive both to implement and to customize. For instance, Pinkberry was the first user to implement the third-party payroll interface, and Wickham said they were able to do that without help from SAP or outside consultants.

Another refreshing difference between the SAP cloud service an traditional ERP systems – hidden charges have been conspicuously absent. Actually, he said, “we have been able to decrease our expense by decreasing the number of users.” And it did that while expanding its business.

And service levels are generally better than he has seen with in-house ERP systems. “There are too many single points of failure with in-house systems,” he says. “With Business ByDesign you don’t have to go through four interfaces to connect to your financials.”

The only complaint he has is that the update cycle has been a little slow at times. SAP has told him that this was connected to complexities in testing involved in the latest version of the platform.

Also, he says, he hopes that SAP and the other large service vendors will open their systems to support more third-party innovation. “The cloud provides a big opportunity for individuals to innovate. The more open the platforms are, the more innovation an happen. And individuals are often able to innovate much faster than large vendors.”

Overall, he says, the cloud is the place to be. “Companies like ours are going to the cloud partly because the services there are providing what we need rather than loads of features that do us no good.”