SAP boosts BI smarts for disties

SAP is making a further push into the SMB business intelligence market by arming its distributors with its full suite of BusinessObject tools.

The German software company bought BusinessObjects in 2008. Until now the only component available to disties was the bare-bones report writer package Crystal Reports.

Announced at SAP’s China Sapphire conference in Beijing this week, the expansion of the BI program is intended to help accelerate the migration of companies currently using Crystal Reports to more sophisticated aspects of SAP's BI portfolio, as well as to spur adoption amongst new customers.

Under the new arrangement, solution providers and VARs who have a relationship with an SAP-endorsed distributor can obtain all SAP BusinessObjects and Edge edition software through those distributors. Edge edition products are releases of the BusinessObjects software packaged specifically for the channel.

Australian distributor ACA Pacific and China National Software & Services are the first disties to receive the expanded privileges, however, SAP said it intends to make the products available throughout its global network of distributors, with rollout to the US a key priority.

ACA’s product manager for SAP Michelle Ng said the company’s 100 or so partners accounted for a significant installed base of Australian companies currently using Crystal Reports, with those servicing the mining, government, education and corporate markets showing interest in adopting smarter BI solutions.

“[We are targeting] anyone who conducts some form of reporting,” Ng said, adding that ACA was seeing particular interest from companies with 50 seats or more.

SAP Australia channels boss Mathew Bolton said company’s enterprise customers in the finance and telco sectors has achieved especially powerful results with its BI and big data solutions - results he said SAP hoped to replicate for SMBs.

“We’re seeing real demand for organisations to make decisions based on real facts in real time in an easily accessible format.”