Brisbane-based VAR, Ascend Business Systems has signed an exclusive reseller agreement with Silicon Valley-based application vendor Gamma Enterprise Technologies in an attempt to snare a chunk of the $30 million SAP tools market.
Gamma develops the InfoShuttle, InfoTrim applications and the JSAP Java toolkit. Ascend would initially launch InfoShuttle, a tool that lets users transfer subsets of live SAP R/3 business data into testing and development environments, non-SAP and data warehouse applications.
InfoShuttle was priced between $40,000 and $150,000 and Ascend boss Mike Chesswas planned to be a dominant player here in this market segment which he believed to be worth $20 million for InfoShuttle alone.
The Asia Pacific market, which Ascend also has rights for, was worth at least another $20 million,' he said.
Ascend had sold InfoShuttle to the Dulux paint division of chemical conglomerate Orica, before the official launch.
'SAP has had a tremendous penetration into the Australian market. Of the 260 companies in Australia that have annual revenues in excess of $1 billion, 50 percent of them run SAP.
'We will be targeting those companies first, followed by the mid-tier and then the SME. And once the product is well established in Australia, we'll be taking it into the Asian market,' he said.
Once InfoShuttle was established, Ascend would take on InfoTrim, a tool used to optimise non-productive systems by removing obsolete or irrelevant data – such as old transaction records – to make the test environment smaller and more easily copied and maintained.
Ascend's national sales manager Andy Broadmeadow, said the InfoTrim market was worth $10 million here and about the same across Asia-Pacific.
Ascend was established in the SAP market as a reseller of Mercury Interactive's automated testing tools. Chesswas said that being able to accurately simulate the load on a system by duplicating a production database in a test environment, added greatly to the effectiveness of the testing.
Gamma founder and CEO, Matthew Minkovsky, said 'it's all about getting it right the first time.'
'SAP is a highly customisable system that benefits greatly from rigorous testing and that testing can't be done properly unless the test environment accurately simulates the real world,' he said.
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