2010 is going to be an important year for SAP in the SME space. SAP is working hard on putting the different pieces of the puzzle together to make it successful in the very competed /discussed about SME space. Key pieces of the puzzle
- Product Portfolio
- Channel
- Enablement
Product Portfolio
SAP has a 3 product strategy for the SME space. The one that is most talked about / awaited is Business By Design. BBD is still only on a limited availability mode from SAP. But they seemed to have made a lot of progress on the product & addressed most of the technical issues & related operational cost issues. It is expected to go into general availability later this year, with the latest version of the product. The other products SAP business one & SAP business all in one fill out the rest of the suite.
Channel
SAP has built out a strong channel organization to reach out & scale the SME business. SAP currently has 5400 partners (VARs, resellers etc) – 2700 are Partners & 2700 Extended Business Partners. In my conversation with some of the partners, they seem to be having a really good relationship & successes with SAP.
The partner channel already accounts for 85% of SME deals, but according to Pat Hume (SVP of Global SME Partner Channel) the goal is to have partners account for 100% of SME sales.
Enablement
Programs like Fast Track – Which is a “packaged” solution by SAP & their partner to implement a solution in 80 days flat - seemed to have achieved its share of success. During the SAP Summit, there were customers cases discussed / presented, whose implementations were done between 4 – 12 weeks. Example - Green Blue Auto SME Customer (Canada) – Green field Implementation was done in 4 weeks flat.
Also SAP is enabling their customers through a variety of models like offering on-demand, Subscription pricing for their All-in-one solution etc.
Below are some data points on the SAP SME front:
- SAP defines SME as customers with revenues lower than 500 Million $
- 75% of SAP’s 92000 customers are SME
- SAP Acquires >35 new SME customer per working day
- 70500 SME Customers in total
- 50500 SME Channel based customers
- Tripled the SME customer base in 3 years
- SAP has 25000 B1 Customers
- SAP SME Number further broken down:
- Upper ME = 11%
- Lower ME = 42%
- SE = 47%
Prashanth Rai
Tags: sap - sme - bbd - sap+summit - b1 - all+in+one - a1
