SAP plans to more aggressively promote partner solutions that currently reside on an SAP App Center marketplace via the SAP Store, the online marketplace it employs to sell its own software.
There are currently 1,800 partner solutions being promoted by SAP via the SAP App Center, with 10 to 12 net new solutions being added every week says Anne Yi, general manager for SAP App Center.
In return for compensating its salespeople to sell those solutions and managing the renewal process, SAP takes a 15% cut of any transaction involving those solutions. The plan now is to over the course of the coming year to find ways to aggressively promote those solutions on an SAP Store marketplace that is now being regularly used by half the installed base of SAP customers, says Yi.
SAP continues to invest in the SAP App Center because it increases utilization of SAP software and deal sizes, while at the same time accelerating the rate at which deals close, says Yi.
“It’s now part of the SAP sales motion,” says Yi. “It’s in their DNA.”
SAP App Center also helps align the sales efforts of SAP salesforce with those of the partners, who retain control over those sales by recording those deals on their “paper,” adds Yi.
App marketplaces such as SAP App Center have clearly reduced the cost of sales for channel partners, while platforms such as SAP Cloud have made it simpler to extend SAP applications. SAP Store, however, is several orders larger than SAP App Center in terms of customer reach.
The biggest issue many partners now face is trying to figure which of the many marketplace options available to them to focus their own limited marketing resources on. It’s also worth noting the harder a marketplace is to join, the more valuable it is likely to be to the partner as users come to trust the solution being made available.
However, once a partner solution makes it on to the SAP App Center it may not always stay there. Yi says SAP is regularly revalidating solutions as they are updated to ensure both a quality customer experience and compliance with various regulatory mandates. Partners that fail to pass those reviews can easily find themselves evicted from an online marketplace that may have become dependent on to meet ever-increasingly aggressive sales goals.
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