SAP Names Former HP Exec To Manage Volume Channel Business
The company has named Mike Coleman to manage its volume channel operations, said Kevin Gilroy, vice president of North America channels, at an SAP channel conference in Las Vegas Monday. Gilroy, who just began working at SAP in mid-January, is himself an HP veteran who, during a 24-year career, served as the company's channel chief and led its global SMB operations.
Coleman's background adds to the growing amount of "channel DNA" at SAP, Gilroy said. Coleman, who will report to Gilroy, will be responsible for SAP's volume channel " a subset of its SME business that covers companies with annual sales under $100 million. SAP Business One is the main product sold into that market space.
Coleman worked at HP for some 20 years and held a number of management positions, including vice president of public-sector channels. Gilroy said Coleman most recently has been working in the venture capital industry.
Until recent years SAP's main focus has been on directly selling its enterprise-class ERP and CRM applications to large companies. In her keynote speech at the Las Vegas conference, Pat Hume, senior vice president of SAP's global indirect sales organization, acknowledged that SAP still has "the DNA of a direct sales culture." Meanwhile the company's Business One and Business All-in-One products " and the channel partners that sell them " at times seemed to be an afterthought.
But several solution providers attending this week's conference said SAP's focus on the channel has undergone major changes under Hume's management.
"I think they've really turned it around [and] they have become a partner-friendly company," said Lutz Lambrecht, senior vice president and managing director at IDS Scheer, which provides implementation and consulting services for the Business All-in-One package. He said SAP today is responsive to his requests for partner support and rules of engagement for working with SAP's sales force. He specifically credits Hume for leading the changes.
"I think the partner program is getting quite good," said William Dunn, president of Dunn Solutions Group, a Skokie, Ill.-based reseller of SAP's BusinessObjects business intelligence products. He said the current channel leadership at the company is much more "channel friendly" than three years ago.
When Hume joined SAP in December 2007, only a third of the company's SME (small and midsize enterprise) sales were through the channel. That number was 52 percent last year and the company plans to rely on the channel for 70 percent of its SME sales within the next couple of years.
This week Hume said ultimately she'd like the channel to account for 100 percent of its SME sales. In a keynote she said the company continues to recruit resellers and increase the range of assistance programs it provides for them, such as the online EcoHub where partners can showcase their solutions. At the conference SAP executives said thecompany is close to launching a "Partner Finder" Web site that will help potential customers find solution providers in specific geographies with expertise in solving specific IT problems.
Channel partners interviewed at the conference also saw the bright side of the news in January that SAP CEO Leo Apotheker had resigned, given the company's poor financial performance in 2009, and Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe were named co-CEOs. Resellers saw the elevation of McDermott, head of SAP's sales and field organization, as a positive for the channel because they think McDermott has a solid grasp of SAP's go-to-market strategy -- including the importance of the channel.