SAP Taps Delaware Consulting To Resell, Service S/4HANA Cloud

SAP has tapped Delaware Consulting, an Alpharetta, Ga.-based Gold partner, to be one of the first six global resellers of the cloud edition of the SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (S/4HANA) application set.

Delaware Consulting is also implementing the S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud applications for its own use, a move that will add to the IT solution provider's expertise for implementing the SAP cloud services for midsize and large organizations.

"We have to know what we are talking about," said Marc van der Zon, business development vice president at Delaware Consulting, in an interview with CRN. "So we made a decision to move there ourselves," he said, referring to the company's first steps to adopt cloud computing several years ago

[Related: SAP Targets Digital Transformation Projects With Its Next Generation Of The HANA Platform]

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

S/4HANA is SAP's next-generation ERP suite and SAP launched the cloud version of the applications in May of last year, offering it in four editions: enterprise management, professional services, finance and manufacturing.

This year SAP has been building up a channel program for partners who sell, service or otherwise work with the vendor's cloud offerings.

In October SAP reported that cloud subscription and support revenue surged 28 percent in its third quarter and sales of the S/4HANA application set were growing and attracting new customers.

Delaware Consulting itself now uses a range of cloud software including Microsoft's Office 365 and SAP's SuccessFactors. It's now rolling out S/4HANA Professional Services Cloud globally and expects to have the entire company running on the system by April of next year. The solution provider is also engaged in a three-year co-development program with SAP to enhance the professional services edition.

As an SAP Gold partner, Delaware Consulting provides the vendor's entire product portfolio to both SMB and enterprise customers. The solution provider is also a Gold certified Microsoft partner, offering that company's business productivity software and business applications, and works with OpenText's enterprise information management software.

As one of the first designated resellers for S/4HANA Cloud, Delaware Consulting is selling subscriptions to the cloud application suite and providing a range of services around the applications, including helping customers determine their system needs and adopting best-practice business processes that fit the software.

Delaware Consulting is having early success selling SAP solutions to businesses that have a mix of legacy applications, often the result of mergers and acquisitions, across multiple geographies, van der Zon said. "The beauty of the public cloud is that it doesn't require the data to be at any specific location," he said.

Other potential customers are businesses that may not have previously considered SAP ERP applications because of the perceived cost and complexity. "That's what makes it so attractive to smaller customers to start new, to move to the cloud," van der Zorn said. "The game-changer is the rapid deployment."

And while some enterprise customers might stick with on-premise applications for their core IT, some are turning to cloud applications to supplement the capabilities of the on-premise applications, the executive said.