Software giant SAP Africa has announced its plans to drive 50% of its software sales through its partner network by 2015. Speaking at the SAP Africa Partner Awards 2010 and Quality Awards 2011 ceremony last night, SAP executives used the platform to celebrate the achievements of their partners and express their commitment to growing the ecosystem further over the coming years.
“We have made a strategic decision to drive a large part of our business through our partners,” said SAP Africa's Ecosystem and Channel Director, Desmond Nair. “Currently, we sell only 15% of our software through our partners, but we plan on increasing this significantly over the coming years, really utilising the diversity and scale gained through collaboration with partners.”
SAP's annual partner awards recognise the contribution SAP's ecosystem makes to the software giant's business and highlights those partners that have excelled in developing and growing their partnership with SAP, while continuing to drive partner success.
“SAP's strategy and success for customers lies in nurturing a rich ecosystem of partners that contributes to the comprehensive value proposition and innovation for our customers. Tonight we recognise those partners that support SAP's strategic goals, programs, and initiatives, and those who best leverage them to promote joint business growth, and additional new business,” added SAP Africa's MD, Pfungwa Serima.
SAP's current ecosystem of partners is split into those that sell software, those that sell services, and those that do both. Nair anticipates that each of these roles will change substantially over the coming years, with previously software-focused partners expanding their work in the SME space to the point where all of SAP's software sales to small and medium businesses will be conducted by partners. Service sales through partner collaboration will also undergo an evolution, with SAP's strategy for innovation - particularly in the cloud, in-memory and in mobile - forming a platform for partners to build on.
“SAP's ambition is to focus on growth beyond its excellent achievements last year, both locally and globally. We plan to embrace the new opportunities that are emerging, both for SAP and our partner network, and are excited to see how strategy comes into effect over the coming years,” concluded Nair.
Notes to editors:
The SAP Partner Award winners are:
Small to Medium Category
Bronze - Accenture for the Botswana Power Corporation Project
Silver - ALTTAB for the New Kenya Co-operative Creameries Project
Gold - SEAL Infotech for the Bidco Oil Refineries Project
Large Enterprise Category
Bronze - HCL Axon for the Pick n Pay Retailers Project
Silver - Britehouse for the Pretoria Portland Cement Company Project
Gold - Deloitte for the AFGRI Operations, Kenya Project
The SAP Partner and Quality Awards
The SAP Partner and Quality Awards are aimed at recognising partners that have achieved excellence in planning and executing their SAP projects and programs; delivering significant benefits to their organisations.
The SAP Quality Awards celebrate partners in Africa that use SAP's quality principles in key focus areas, which includes effectively managing software implementations marked by complex technical and business process requirements; making the extraordinary look ordinary, excelling in execution and delivering significant benefits and achieving fast, low-cost implementations to meet today's demands for fast time to value.
The focus areas were further categorised according to small to medium category, which covers template-based implementations, such as SAP Business ByDesign, SAP Business One, SAP Business All-in-One, SAP BusinessObjects solutions (on a small to medium scale), and SAP Crystal solutions; and the Large Enterprise Category, which recognises medium to large SAP implementation projects with or without a multi-country roll-out.
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