SAP Steps Up Partner Recruitment Efforts For HANA

SAP has spent this week promoting its HANA in-memory database at its Sapphire Now conference. Now comes the work of selling it to the company's channel partners.

Thursday the company launched the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud partner program, which the company said would provide SAP channel partners -- including resellers, ISVs and systems integrators -- with access to best-practice information and methodologies, enablement services and other resources.

The company said that through the program resellers and service providers can more quickly ramp up their HANA sales and pre-sales efforts and consulting services.

[Related: SAP Ships Business Suite For HANA, Readies New Release Of Business One Apps ]

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The company also announced a HANA marketplace addition to the online SAP store where ISV partners can show off and sell their HANA-based applications.

The initiatives are part of what's sure to be a major push by SAP to get the 12,600 resellers, integrators and development partners in the company's ecosystem to adopt HANA.

Officially launched in 2010, SAP has been ramping up HANA sales -- especially in the last year. IDC calculates that partners in 2012 generated $4.2 billion in revenue related to SAP's in-memory database technology, a number that will rise to $10.5 billion in 2017.

This week SAP executives have made it clear that HANA will be the platform for all SAP products -- and channel partners better be on board.

"HANA is the platform and every [SAP] product leverages HANA -- not only the HANA database and HANA application services, but the HANA cloud platform as well," said Vishal Sikka, member of the SAP executive board who oversees the vendor's technology and innovation efforts, in a press conference Thursday.

NEXT: Sapphire Now Partner Attendees Are Buying Into HANA

Company execs have spent much of the week extolling HANA's potential advantages to partners.

"We see a set of opportunities opening up in building new applications, in new kinds of technologies for cloud data movement. So there are tremendous opportunities for channel partners in the entire ecosystem," SAP's Sikka said.

"We have lots of Business One partners who have Business One running on HANA," said Kevin Gilroy, SAP's head of global indirect channels, in an interview. Business One is SAP's channel-popular application set for small and mid-size businesses. "And [there are] partners who have applications in general running on HANA. So there's an application play."

"It's opening the door to new markets where speed is needed," Gilroy continued, referring to vertical industries such as healthcare that "may be very data-intensive and very speed-intensive. It's another door into net-new business."

Solution providers at SapphireNow are buying into the strategy. "The thing I like is that we now have a platform, a true platform," said Sylvana Coche, CEO of Gravity Pro, a San Clemente, Calif.-based partner. Gravity Pro works with SAP's ERP applications and business intelligence software and is certified to work with HANA. Coche said the in-memory database technology will help her help customers with their big data challenges. "They have the data everywhere. But they don't know what to do with it," she said.

Lars Landwehrkamp, CEO of All For One Steeb, an SAP partner in Filderstadt, Germany, has only had a few HANA customers so far. But in an interview he said he expects that most or all of his new customers will adopt HANA as they implement SAP systems. And, Landwehrkamp said SAP pays him a margin for selling the HANA database, something he said he doesn't earn when he sells Oracle database software.

Alert Enterprise, a Fremont, Calif.-based ISV, develops its corporate and critical infrastructure security applications on HANA, said Pan Kamal, the company's marketing vice president, in a partner roundtable at Sapphire Now. He said HANA was able to speed up the processing of huge volumes of threat detection data -- 900 times faster than the application could using other database technology. The ISV is offering a trial version of its product through the SAP Store.

SAP also said it has increased its commitment to help fund startups developing software for HANA. Last year the company announced the SAP HANA Real Time Fund with $155 million. This week the company said it is more than doubling that to $405 million.

PUBLISHED MAY 16, 2013