Exceptional results for SAP Africa's business partners

SAP Africa's business partners in the corporate and small and medium enterprise (SME) sectors achieved exceptional results during 2005, contributing to the global solutions giant's 62% peer group market share internationally, and its 71% peer group market share in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Services and alliance partners influenced 60% of SAP Africa's software revenues in 2005 (up from 51% in 2004) and the company's new SME channel exceeded budget by 115%, bringing in 143 entirely new customers in 12 months.

"What's particularly remarkable about our SME results is that most of 2005 was spent setting up our channel from scratch," said SAP Africa SME director, Brett Parker, speaking at the SAP Africa Business Partner Awards cocktail evening held at Summit Place in Sandton on Thursday, 11 May 2006. "So we went from zero to over-achievement in spite of the fact that most of our business partners were still finding their feet, both in the market and on our products."

SAP Africa's SME channel now has 22 certified sales people for mySAP All-in-One (for medium-sized organisations) and 46 for SAP Business One (for small organisations).

The company's awards to SME channel partners recognised their success across a range of different operational areas - revenue contribution, number of new customers (market share), pipeline build and lead generation activities, number of customer reference sites, and commitment to developing capability and capacity in the areas of sales, marketing and technical implementation and support.

On the corporate side, awards made to SAP Africa partners were based strongly on customer satisfaction as measured by an annual global customer survey that focuses on partner's implementation capabilities. "We've over-achieved in this area too, with a remarkable rise in customer satisfaction," said SAP Africa's director of strategic business development, Maphum Nxumalo.

"We attribute that to a marked enthusiasm among our business partners to be trained and certified on new releases of our products and, particularly, on our NetWeaver-driven business process platform approach to the market.

"As SAP moves, through services-oriented architecture, to becoming a business process platform provider, so there is even greater opportunity and flexibility in our go to market strategy for business partners to contribute their own intellectual capital to a customer's solution. In the case of our services and alliance partners, there is also the opportunity to plan a solution with us - and, very often, to co-market it with us.

"As a result, many of our business partners are capitalising on the opportunity to co-create rather than simply co-sell a solution. And that bodes extremely well not just for the future of SAP and its business partners but for that of our joint customers as well."

In the enterprise category, the winners were:

Business Development Award (alliance partners) - Accenture
Business Development Award (service partners) - UCS Solutions
Business Development Award (Africa region) - Accenture Nigeria
Business Development Award (BEE partners) - Izazi Solutions
BEE Partner Innovation Award - Lejara Consulting
Partner Excellence Award (technology partners) - IBM
Partner Excellence Award (service partners) - NokusaEI
Partner Excellence Award (alliance partners) - IBM Business Consulting Services

In the SME awards category, the winners were:

mySAP All-in-One - Core People
SAP Business One - BlueKey