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SAP on the look out for regional distis and resellers

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DQW Bureau
13 Mar 2006





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ERP major SAP India is in the process of appointing

regional distributors and resellers for its newly launched SAP Business One.

This is the first time the company is looking at working closely with the

channel partners, mainly system integrators at tier-two and tier-three level. It

is to promote Business One-a solution for small enterprises.

“Business One was launched last month in India, mainly to

provide a full-fledged and affordable enterprise solution for the small

companies here. India is known for its vast SME base and it would be a perfect

solution for this market. And channel partners would be the right way to promote

the solution,” said Pranay Mital, Director-Channel Business (APA), SAP Asia.

Following the Business One launch in India, SAP has

appointed HP as the national distributor for the product. It has also appoin­ted

15 resellers in the market. “Going forward, we will create a new

layer-regional distributor, who will be responsible to sell to the resellers.

Initially, we will have seven regional distri­butors across the country, before

taking the final tally to 12,” he said.

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SAP will also increase the reseller number up to 100,

within the next one-year, while national distys would be increased up to three

during the same period. “The increased channel presence will help the company

to tap more business and SAP is aiming to bring in 100 new customers in the

first year of launch of Business One. With this, we look at more of customer

acquisitions than increasing the revenue base. Overall, our SMB market share is

growing significantly year-after-year,” pointed out Mital.

SAP is looking at creating special channels for specific

verticals such as retail, automotive, pharma, chemi­cals, industrial machinery

and components and service providers (telco), among others. The company is

taking HP's help while identifying the channel with solution providing skills.

It will offer an extensive program for the channels covering aspects such as

solution training, technical training, providing solution development kit,

certification and more.

“We want partners with both domain knowledge and

geographical strengths. Channel are given an opportunity to develop solutions

around SAP platform, while the company would push for collaborative model

(working with an ISV) also in some cases,” he mentioned.

S Gopikrishnan Chennai, Feb 28

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