SAP Australia grows local resellers fivefold

SAP has grown its Australian partner network by more than five times in the past five years.

The channel expansion shows how the company, once known largely for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, is diversifying into platform development, mobility and cloud, said Anthony McMahon, senior vice president, ecosystem & channels, SAP Asia Pacific Japan.

While visiting Australia this week, McMahon took time to detail the partner growth to CRN.

"Even five years ago, we had about 50 partners to run the implementation business. Now we have more than 250 and they are not just system integrators. We have distributors, value-added resellers and more of a footprint in the OEM and cloud space," said McMahon.

He added that SAP had seen "very rapid" acceleration in partner growth in the past 12 months.

SAP has expanded into new sectors, such as mobility through the acquisition of Sybase, business intelligence with BusinessObjects, platform development with SAP HANA and people management with SuccessFactors.

McMahon said this was allowing SAP's direct salesforce to offer a broader sell to the company's named accounts and open up other large accounts to the channel.

He said typical channel structures, such as a two-tier model, marketing development funding and partner recruitment, had all been new to SAP Australia.

SAP runs a channel program, Partner Edge, which it expanded last year with the appointment of Express Data as distributor.

Recently, SAP partner Presence of IT rolled out a solution based on SAP payroll and SuccessFactors’ Employee Central, while another partner, Artis Group, deployed SAP Business ByDesign for client Redflex Traffic Systems.

McMahon countered rumours that surfaced last that SAP had plans to wind down Business ByDesign. "ByDesign is here to stay, we are investing and it had been very successful in this market."

In its most recent local filings, SAP Australia posted revenues of $626.8 million for the 12 months to 31 December 2012, an 8.5 percent rise year-on-year.

At the time, SAP Australia chief operating officer Greg Miller pointed to cloud and mobility as two segments growing faster than the company average, and  stressed that SAP's push to expand its indirect sales was gaining momentum.

SAP has a global target to reach 40 percent indirect sales by 2015. That figure stood at 34 percent for its 2012 financial year.