10 Things Partners Need to Know About SAP

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SAP

SAP recently launched a swath of initiatives designed to create a wealth of new opportunities for channel partners.

There are more than 15,000 SAP partners, and they account for 30% of the company’s overall business. Half of large enterprise deals and 85% of new customers come via channel partners. But only 7,000 partners are deemed active: They generate at least one deal every other quarter. SAP plans to triple the size of the General Business organization that manages the channel by 2020.

Roughly 90% of SAP’s revenues are delivered via on-premise solutions, but the company aims to see that number drop to 60% as its cloud offerings gain more momentum.

As of the third quarter, there were 4,100 SAP S/4HANA customers globally, with 350 of them being live implementations. Just over half (58%) of those deals are being generated by partners. This month, SAP started shipping version 16.10 of its ERP suite.

The company earned impressive growth from sales of SAP Hybris e-commerce and SAP SuccessFactors HR software in SAP’s SMB segment, with 6,000 SMB customers using SuccessFactors. SAP says its cloud business is seeing 100% growth, versus double-digit growth for on-premise software. A new referral program for partners is expected to fuel more growth. SAP says it has 3,000 cloud partners, and 2,100 of them already certified.

SAP has several business and channel sales programs addressing partner cloud transformation, cloud sales accelerators and cloud services packaging. The company is also starting up a Partner Sales Academy to share best practices and train partners on how to use digital media and social networking to drive sales.

At its core, SAP HANA is an in-memory database. On top of HANA, there’s a SAP HANA Cloud Platform that is based in the open-source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment. SAP HANA Vora is an implementation of the Apache Spark in-memory framework that SAP is positioning as a complement to the HANA database.

For all the marketing focus on SAP HANA and the SAP S/4 HANA ERP application, the biggest driver of new customer adoption has been the Business One ERP application aimed at the midmarket. SAP Business One accounts for 90% of all net new SAP customers. SAP By Design is a cloud-based ERP application aimed at the lower end of the midmarket, and SAP Anywhere is a suite of cloud-based business applications aimed primarily at small businesses.

SAP APIs are all hosted on SAP AP Hub, an instance of API management software developed by Apigee (now owned by Google). The SAP microservices strategy is based on containers in both SAP HANA and the containers made available in the Cloud Foundry PaaS.

As part of a drive to maximize opportunities in the internet of things, SAP is now embedding a layer of IoT services in the HANA database. SAP is also creating a partner ecosystem to develop IoT applications based on machine learning algorithms.

SAP is developing a series of applications that will run natively on Apple iOS devices, with hooks to backend HANA services built in. There is also a software development kit (SDK) and training from SAP that partners can take use to build applications on behalf of customers.