SAP as part of a drive to increase adoption of cloud services spanning everything from software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to instances of the SAP HANA database this week launched a global Cloud Accelerator initiative.
Via this channel program SAP will provide access to business development funds to help to develop and execute a digital marketing plan, says Karl Fahrbach, senior vice president and head of global channels for SAP.
The SAP Cloud Accelerator program addresses everything from service activation to helping partners develop their intellectual property on top of SAP cloud services,” says Fahrbach.
“We want to help partners both land and expand,” says Fahrbach.
Any SAP partner willing to craft a business plan outlining a yearly target to grow their cloud business in the small-to-medium enterprise (SME) by at least 50 percent can qualify for the program, says Fahrbach.
Fahrbach notes that many channel partners especially need help building marketing plans that target line of business (LOB executives rather than traditional IT. Most of the budget allocated to SaaS applications comes from budgets direct controlled by LOB executives, notes Fahrbach. SAP is 100 percent reliant on channel partners to reach SME customers, so Fahrhach says teaching partners how to engage LOB executives has become a high priority.
SAP is also anxious to push as much of its ERP and HANA database business into the cloud as possible. It costs substantially less for SAP and its partners to support instances of applications and middleware running in the cloud than it does to support them in an on-premises environment.
The company reported last quarter that cloud subscription revenues grew more than 22 percent. Based on that momentum, SAP says it expects full-year 2017 non-IFRS cloud subscriptions and support revenue to be in a range of €3.8 billion to €4.0 billion at constant currencies.
Much of that success is attributed to channel partners that SAP has been investing heavily, in not only training but also developing co-selling models through which SAP goes to market jointly with a partner. All told, Fahrbach says the company has added nearly 600 partners to target LOB customers, and the company hopes to add 700 more by 2020.
The challenge SAP faces it is that competition across the cloud application space has never been fiercer. Every provider of on-premises software is trying to shift as much of their business into the cloud for the same reasons as SAP. But many providers of rival SaaS applications are already well-entrenched. The issue facing SAP now is not only how much of its software can it move into the cloud, but also supplant rivals that have now been selling SaaS applications for the better part of a decade.
Be First to Comment