SAP reinforces OEM strategy to reach out to a wider customer base

 Anthony McMahon, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Operations, SAP Asia Pacific Japan shares with VARINDIA about its new OEM & ISV arrangement and how with its renewed strategy and approach, SAP targets to reach a market of 1 billion customers
2015 has a lot in store for SAP! Primarily because the software major has set an ambitious goal of doubling the size of its addressable market, achieve revenue of euro 20 billion and reach 1 billion people. To reach a goal of this magnitude and to accelerate its growth in the country, SAP has strengthened its newly launched integrated OEM and ISV program.SAP is cooperating with 2,000 companies around the world based on its OEM partnerships.
Going forward, as a part of its OEM program, OEM partners can embed SAP’s world-class solutions and platforms directly into their own applications for greater market potential and build more robust, more reliable products and give customers the best of both worlds. So far SAPhas 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, to its partners. This means that OEM and ISV partners can provide offerings combining their industry-specific products with SAP solutions.
Reiterating on this new partner engagement, Anthony McMahon, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Operations, SAP Asia Pacific Japan says, “We have this newly launched OEM program that is further going to facilitate our partner ecosystem. We have a lot of partners and also customers. We sell softwares to customers and then these softwares get implemented by partners. But now we are planning our focus on our customers' customer by means of offering them a differentiated solution. Our technologies are getting embedded in their end solutions, whether it is in a cloud offering, equipment or devices or database solutions and then these get sold as a differentiated solution to their customers. The best part here is that they don’t have to spend their R&D on this technology and can spend their money on increasing their value chain.”
SAP also extended its commitment to a broad-based program for ISVs in this market called “PartnerEdge for Application Development”.  Through this program, ISV’s of all sizes can develop, embed or migrate their products to SAP platform, currently consisting of 6 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.
Furthermore, to expand and strengthen its partner base in critical focus areas like mobility, cloud, SAP HANA and emerging markets, SAP has joined hands with some new partners. This 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 works with more than 420 partners in India today.
The Key partners with whom SAP has signed up areBlue Star Infotech, ZenFocus Inc, Hexaware Technologies, NEC Technologies India,RS Social, Persistent Systems, SIFY Corporation, IBCS-PRIMAX and Tech Pacific Lanka

Betting Big on MCaaS…
Additionally, SAP has leveraged the Managed Cloud Service (MCaaS) model to provide enhanced value to businesses. Partners on their part are increasingly embracing SAP’s MCaaS deployment model to reach out to a broader customer base and penetrate segments for whom on-premise deployments are either unmanageable or unaffordable. MCaaS reduces total IT costs by 30% 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.
Reinforcing its commitment to building and expanding a qualified ecosystem, SAP India has recently felicitated 14 partners 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. n