SAP on drive to fill solution gaps

By Samantha Perry for SAP

Johannesburg, 03 Apr 2007

SAP Africa last week kicked off its ISV recruitment drive in South Africa at its first local Software Solution Provider Forum. SAP aims to fill some 600 white spaces in its available solution sets and is recruiting local and international partners to do it.

SAP Africa MD Claas Keuhenmann says SAP has some 38 000 customers, worldwide, and intends to increase this to 100 000 by 2010. In order to this, he says, the company needs ISVs to join its partner programme and develop software that SAP can add to its solution sets. "We cannot do it by acting alone," says Jukka Tapaninen, VP Software Solution Provider at SAP.

SAP has three types of partners - resellers, which sell its product, predominantly the SME SAP BusinessOne solution, Systems Integrators (SIs), which integrate its solution, some of which also sell product, and ISVs, which develop software that plugs into the SAP solution set.

SAP developed it's 'Powered by Netweaver' programme, which certifies ISVs and SIs to develop and integrate to its platform, in 2004/2005. The programme was officially launched at the company's SAPPHIRE conferences in the US and EMEA in 2005.

Keuhnemann says the company drove the programme strongly into major markets like the UK, USA, Japan and Germany in its first few years and is now focusing on markets like South Africa, where it was introduced last year.

SAP currently has some 35 channel partners and 35 services (SI) partners in South Africa (there is overlap here), with a further 39 channel partners and 10 services partners in the rest of the sub-Saharan region. Kuehenmann says the company is aiming to have 20 to 30 local solutions to add to its solution sets within the next year.

"The key here is the drive into the SME market and this is the market we are addressing with our channel and this is where we have the biggest focus on driving the number of customers," he adds.

"We recently appointed a global head for the channel market, Hans-Peter Klaey, who was previously head of the Asia-Pacific region. He is now the global head of SAP's SME and channel business, reporting directly into the board. There's a lot of focus behind it [the channel programme], a lot of investment, a lot of time."

A further element of SAP's growth strategy is its On-Demand offerings. "We're going into the software as a service type business," says Keuhnemann. "We have numerous plans to bring solutions to market using different business models and plans. Basically we're driving innovation on two fronts- we're driving product innovation together with the ISVs, then there's the business model innovation - using new channels to market, on-demand, the ISV approach, channel approach - those are the key elements of our strategy."