Acknowledging the resounding success and power of a vibrant ecosystem, SAP AG has reinforced its strategy of accelerating the Indian ecosystem by announcing an integrated approach to strengthen its newly-launched OEM and ISV programs and encouraging partners to leverage the Managed Cloud as a Service (MCaaS) model to provide enhanced value to businesses. The announcement was made at the SAP India Partner Summit 2014 held in Mumbai during May 28-29.
With more than 420 partners today in India, SAP provides both local and worldwide support for all SAP markets and solutions to help fuel innovation and provide choice for customers of all sizes. By 2015, at least 40 per cent of SAP’s software revenue will come from the partners.
“Speed-to-market is the winning edge in today’s highly networked economy, and that’s why our partners are adopting SAP technologies for use in their solutions. They want to expedite development and create innovative offerings without having to invest more in R&D. When they turn to SAP business innovation platforms they accelerate their development. They help grow the ecosystem which in turn fuels more innovation,” said Anthony McMahon, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Operations, SAP Asia Pacific Japan.
Developed to support partners with latest innovations, often tailored to a specific industry or use case by the ecosystem, SAP’s new approach aims to lead to a future of personalized products and services. Some of the key highlights announced at the Partner Summit are:
Strategic roadmap for strengthening Partner Programs: So far, SAP has supplied only some of its products such as Sybase DB and BusinessObjects to its OEM and ISV partners, but it will now begin providing additional offering such as enterprise applications, mobility, SAP HANA and cloud solutions. This means that OEM and ISV partners can provide offerings combining their industry-specific products with SAP solutions.
OEM Program: Going forward, partners can embed SAP’s world-class solutions and platforms directly into their own applications, for greater market potential, by becoming an SAP OEM partner. This will enable them to build more robust and reliable products for less, and give customers the best of both worlds: unparalleled SAP functionality backed by a deep industry knowledge and expertise. SAP is co-operating with 2,000 companies around the world based on OEM partnerships.
In India, Rolta, a leading provider of innovative IT solutions, leverages SAP’s big data, mobility and cloud technologies for managing its OneView Enterprise Suite and recently won the SAP Pinnacle Award for ‘OEM of the Year’.
iCreate, a Banking Decision Sciences pioneer, delivers enhanced enterprise information management capability to the global banking sector in collaboration with SAP. iCreate has integrated its banking solution with BI solutions with SAP. This partnership is aligned with a shared vision between iCreate and SAP to help banks run their businesses faster and better with informed decisions.
Broader ISV program: SAP also extended its commitment to a broad-based program for ISVs in this market called “PartnerEdge for Application Development”. Through this program, ISVs of all sizes can develop, embed or migrate their products to SAP platform, currently consisting of six innovation packs ranging from Analytics, In-Memory computing, Mobile development platform and Database. With this exhaustive portfolio, SAP is ideally positioned to co-innovate with ISV’s to help take their products to the next level and exploit market opportunities today and in the future. India is a strategic market unit for SAP’s ISV business, and SAP aims to grow its ISV engagement three-fold in the current year.
Some of the key partners who have enrolled for this program are TAKE Solutions, Arteria Technologies, Vantage Agora Inc., and Defiance Technologies.
Betting big on MCaaS: Partners are increasingly embracing SAP’s MCaaS deployment model to reach out to a broader customer base and penetrate segments for which on-premise deployments are either unmanageable or unaffordable. MCaaS reduces total IT costs by 30 per cent compared to an on-premise deployment. SAP continues to encourage its partners to leverage this innovative program to cater to unique needs and growth ambitions of customers in India.
Partners like NTT Data Solutions are taking SAP HCM solutions to a large number of customers by leveraging their domain expertise in the HCM area and the simplicity of the managed cloud offering. Similarly, IT Champs, a premier consulting house, offers ERP in Cloud through MCaaS for customers in upcountry locations in Karnataka and the rest of south India.
Compuage Infocom Ltd., a leading IT distribution company based in Bangalore, has partnered with SAP to offer SAP Business One offering to its target customers through managed cloud.
Additionally, reinforcing its commitment to building and expanding a qualified ecosystem, SAP India felicitated 14 winners with the SAP Partner Awards 2014. The award recognized the best partners in India for having supported high business value for enterprises of all sizes and in every major vertical segment.
The Award winners are Sonata Information Technology Ltd., IT Champs Software Private Ltd., Globalnest IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Global Infonet Distribution Pvt. Ltd., Uneecops Technologies Ltd., Inspira Enterprises, Rolta India Ltd., Consus Consulting Group, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., vCentric Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Wipro Ltd., IBM India Ltd., vCentric Technologies Pvt. Ltd., and KloudData.
Expanding reach with new partnerships in India
SAP India, a subsidiary of SAP AG, has announced its plan to further expand and strengthen its ecosystem with new partners in critical focus areas like mobility, cloud, SAP HANA, and emerging markets. This move will allow SAP to explore untapped opportunities by jointly venturing into the market and offering advanced solutions to its existing and prospective customers, and thereby creating greater value for customers.
SAP is intensifying its partner engagement strategy to understand customer requirements and provide them joint solutions by leveraging SAP’s cutting-edge platform, technology, power of Cloud, and the SAP ecosystem’s industry expertise. As an open innovator, the company is offering multiple platforms for partner development and collaboration to co-innovate across the following key focus areas:
Mobility: The key partners who have signed up are Blue Star Infotech, to build growth in Mobility and Analytics businesses and provide solutions to pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and media industries, and ZenFocus Inc., will be using SAP’s Mobility, Asset Management and Analytics capabilities to provide value to asset intensive customers
Cloud: To offer customers the choice of deployment with cloud and hosting services that will help them save money and run their businesses better, SAP is engaging with leading industry players, like Hexaware Technologies for enterprise warehouse management and transportation management solutions, with their strong travel and logistics practice and SAP Cloud solutions, NEC Technologies India which will be working on the SAP cloud portfolio of Success Factors, Cloud for Customer, Social Media Analytics and Business by Design for Japanese investment companies in India, and RS Social which has partnered with SAP and will offer the Success Factors solution for talent and performance management.
SAP HANA: In order to enhance the profitability of every customer engagement with real-time analytics, SAP has collaborated with Persistent Systems to help expand their expertise across SAP solutions and enhance support to the growing client base across multiple industries, and with the SIFY Corporation which will address the end-to-end IT services requirements of customers around SAP applications and technology solutions.
Being one of the key areas for growth, the emerging markets such as Sri Lanka and Bangladesh offer tremendous potential for SAP. IBCS-PRIMAX and SAP partnership in Bangladesh will leverage local competency with the wealth of industry solutions that SAP offers. With a competent local partner, SAP aims to demonstrate its capability to deliver working solutions in Bangladesh.
Tech Pacific Lanka, one of the key players in the Sri Lankan market, will provide coverage for SAP solutions by working with smaller local IT companies and leveraging industry-focused implementation partners from India.