Vivek Rawat, Director – Ecosystem & Channel, SAP India, talked to Jasmine Desai about how the vendor was using its channel partner ecosystem to deliver greater value to customers across India from the metros to smaller towns
Could you elaborate on SAP’s strategy for 2012?
SAP’s strategy is built on five pillars—mobility, HANA, Cloud, database and BI—as is our ecosystem. Another part to it is about co-innovating with our partners around these five pillars. From a strategy perspective, the co-innovation is about the platform.
We want to extend the markets with our partners because we are no longer just about the core. Therefore, we need to have a multi-channel route to the market and we want to bring simplicity to the partner community.
For large enterprises, we have service partners. They do not resell, rather it is about having the service capability. There are over 30 partners that we work with on the services side. According to global statistics, 70% of the services market is handled by partners.
What is SAP’s strategy for SMBs?
SMBs want a faster return on investment (as low as four to twelve weeks). To achieve this, we came up with a portfolio called All-in-One. We worked with our channel partners so that they had a fixed scope and offering. They took the All-in-One portfolio with its fixed templates and built industry flavors on top of that. They are given fixed templates since SAP has the expertise of doing this over the years. These partners are certified locally and they build expertise in the local industry. However, this portfolio is not limited to SMBs and it can also be extended to the large enterprise. We have over two hundred partners in India. There are 30 channel partners and 22 of them have specialized templates in industries like retail, sugar, gems, apparel, poultry and CGD. These templates are certified before the partners can go to market with them. Over 45% of our business is for solutions other than ERP. The core is important but our customers are building a lot of systems around the core and that is fueling our growth.
We are also coming up with Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS) offerings. Over the years, we have started building OEM partnerships. With the acquisition of Sybase and BusinessObjects, we started building OEM partnerships. Last year, we signed eight OEMs and we plan to double that figure in 2012.
We have started seeing a lot of requirements coming from non-metro cities in India. We have put a gold strategy in place this year to expand beyond the metros. Then there’s a program called Extended Business Members (EBM) where channel partners tie-up with VARs and do value added market coverage.
What are the developments on the Cloud and BI front?
On the Cloud computing front, for Business ByDesign, we signed up over eight partners last year. We rolled out hosted offerings from our partners that are specific to our customers in India. From the partner perspective, we have given multiple offerings for them to go to market with. They build the infrastructure and licenses part of it but they deliver it as a hosted offering.
We have signed up with Wipro and they take our All-in-One portfolio and put it on the partner’s premise but give it to them on a chargeable basis. We are also tying up with telcos for Cloud offerings. Globally, we have tied up with lots of telcos to take our offerings to the Cloud.
We brought some specialized BI partners on board last year. They do implementations around certain industry templates. These are apart from the 30 VARs that do BI implementations. At present, everybody needs BI. Different markets have different drivers—the financial industry has so many regulations etc.—but BI is pervasive. This is the approach that we took, even for mobility.
In the backdrop of changing market dynamics, how is partner ecosystem helping?
As a part of our growth strategy, we are reaching out to non-metro cities. Here we look for partners that understand a particular local market and the industries in it. They may not specialize in a particular industry. These partners, in turn, tie-up with master VARs.
We are also extending training programs to these partners. We want to concentrate on macro industries. The second aspect is clearly about expansion. One interesting development from these cities is around the core itself. Once they implement the core, they want to build additional capabilities around it in terms of mobility, BI etc.
Most partners, when they go with industry templates, also have templates for reporting, which is usually rolled-out in the second phase.
Our business partners are also asset driven. Depending on how big the industry is, they build assets. On the channel side, we are encouraging partners to build assets in a particular industry so that we can approach that market and give a faster RoI to our customers.
One set of partners works in situations wherein the core has already been implemented and now the reporting capabilities can be deployed. Another set of partners works on the asset side. We want more partners based on assets, because assets are repeatable.
