SAP Expands Channel Partner Education, Marketing Offerings

SAP expects to generate more than half of its sales through the channel this year as the company implements a series of channel initiatives, building on its decision earlier this year to give resellers near-exclusive rights to sell to small and midsize customers.

The initiatives include new online marketing and demand-generation resources, particularly targeting vertical industries. And slated for launch in the U.S. in the third quarter is SAP's online university to provide channel partners with training in software marketing fundamentals.

"It's a sign of the channel program maturation at SAP," said Chris Clinton, vice president of global multichannel programs and marketing at SAP.

All this is part of SAP's efforts to increase sales to small and midsize enterprise (SME) customers. And that means an increased reliance on the channel, which SAP expects to account for 55 percent of its sales this year compared to 37 percent in 2008, said Patricia Hume, SAP's senior vice president for SME Indirect Channel. (Part of that jump is due to SAP's acquisition of Business Objects in 2008 and its stable of resellers.)

A major part of that effort is SAP's decision earlier this year to give its channel partners near-exclusive rights to sell SAP Business One, SAP Business All-in-One and SAP Business Objects software to SMEs. With the exception of a few named accounts assigned to SAP's direct sales force, customers in the U.S. with annual sales of $300 million or less are left exclusively for solution providers. (That threshold also applies in Latin America, Asia and Japan. In Canada and in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, customers with annual revenue of less than $500 million are reserved for channel partners.)

SAP has been working with four U.S. channel partners this year to design marketing services, demand generation materials and other resources to help solution providers expand sales in targeted vertical markets. Clinton said the goal of the SAP Impact Initiative is to ensure that channel partners have what they need to create and execute demand-generation activities.

The Impact Initiative "has helped Optimal Solutions gain insight into the industries we are targeting and has allowed a more precise look into how companies in today's economy are spending and where they are focusing," said Elliot Garofalo, senior vice president of SME at Optimal Solutions, one of the four channel partners SAP has been working with, in a statement.

SAP also is rolling out an online self-service system called "Virtual Agency" that channel partners can use to build and execute marketing campaigns.

And the Impact Initiative provides channel partners with access to SAP business partners, including IBM, HP and Intel, for help with their go-to-market efforts. SAP also is identifying its own field-marketing resources that can be used to augment partners' marketing activities.

The online university, which Clinton said would be free for channel partners, will offer 10 training modules in such areas as marketing techniques and strategy, and competitive analysis. "We're not just offering automated [marketing] tools, we're providing the coaching and the resources," Clinton said.