SAP says demand for partners outstrips supply

Enterprise software giant SAP has seen its ANZ partner ecosystem grow on the back of strong demand for its S/4 HANA enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and cloud products.

Speaking to CRN, SAP ANZ chief operating officer Pete Andrew said the vendor is becoming a big part of partners’ high-growth agenda.

“The last year has been a real positive uplift on our partner relationships and close collaborations we have with the major partners and market, but also with the specialist niche providers,” Andrew said.

Head of partners and channels Mark Hettler said SAP still has some 500 Australian customers that needs to move to S/4 HANA over the next five years.

“There’s a load of work in there for partners at the moment, and that’s not including all the net new work as we get our edge products,” Hettler said.

“We’re also starting to see the takeup of the SAP cloud platform, which has got analytics, development capability, integration and more, so there’s a lot of upside for partners at the moment.”

With that amount of work on offer, Hettler said SAP is in the happy position of handling inboud partnering requests and has therefore eased off partner recruitment efforts. “A lot of these requests are from offshore partners wanting to establish in Australia, so [the country] is seen a real growth area for SAP,” he said.

Hettler said before his appointment, sentiment expressed in SAP partner advisory councils was “a little hostile” when it came to getting more work in the market, but the increased demand has quelled that hostility..

“At the moment, demand outstrips capacity, and that’s why partners are being snapped up just to be able to meet that demand,” Hettler added.

Since the start of the year, the following SAP partners have been acquired by larger SIs: EY acquired Sydney-based Plaut IT Australia in January; Deloitte bought Presence of IT in October; DXC absorbed Sydney-based Bluleader in November; and SoftwareONE acquired Melbourne-based BNW in the same month. Cloud integrator SXiQ and Acclimation also teamed up to provide S/4 HANA migrations in September.