SAP Offers Partner Incentives to Further Boost HANA Adoption
Enterprise software giant SAP mentioned some impressive adoption numbers for HANA, its in-memory data platform, during a press call yesterday. Kevin Gilroy, senior vice president of Global Indirect Channels, called HANA “an innovative, tipping-point product” with 400 customers, nearly half of which have “fully functional” projects involving some 70,000 end-users.
SAP hopes to boost those numbers even more by offering several new incentive programs for its resellers and service partners.
New HANA Sales Opportunities
Bobby Vetter, SAP’s senior vice president of Ecosystem and Channels, said beginning later this month SAP will make all editions of HANA available for resellers, including a new HANA limited runtime edition, a lower-priced option that can run pre-defined applications and pre-defined content, and a HANA database edition for Business Warehouse (BW), SAP’s data warehouse which Vetter said has “thousands and thousands” of customers.
Earlier this year when SAP announced that HANA would be central to its database strategy, the company said it was already running selected customer ERP systems on HANA, with plans for a full ramp-up of SAP ERP on HANA by the end of 2012. As SAP makes it possible to run additional applications on HANA, it creates even more opportunities for its partners, Vetter said.
Vetter described two different types of rebates or incentives that are available for resellers and partners, depending on the type of sale and the products sold. Resellers will get a credit in addition to their usual percentage of the software deal, which they can then use to improve their sales and/or implementation resources. For service partners like IBM and Accenture, SAP will issue credits to customers which they can then use to pay for the partner’s services.
According to Gilroy, partners are currently involved in 33 percent of SAP’s sales, a number SAP wants to boost to 40 percent by 2015. Partners will be a key resource for helping SAP meet the growing customer demand for HANA, Vetter said. “We have so much to do that we need to get more resources on the ground.”
SAP’s Cloud Plans for HANA
Vetter and Gilroy also touched upon SAP’s plans for cloud implementations of HANA. There are currently 4,000 instances of HANA on Amazon Web Services, all used by licensed developers, a number that Gilroy said shows HANA has “good traction from developers.”
Vetter said HANA ultimately will factor into all of SAP’s cloud plans. “In principle we’re open” to using other cloud providers for HANA, he said, and SAP intends to offer more than development instances of HANA. In time, he said, HANA “will propel [SAP’s] own on-demand solution.”
Ann All is the editor of Enterprise Apps Today. Follow Enterprise Apps Today on Twitter @EntApps2Day.
Public relations, digital marketing, journalism, copywriting. I have done it all so I am able to communicate any information in a professional manner. Recent work includes creating compelling digital content, and applying SEO strategies to increase website performance. I am a skilled copy editor who can manage budgets and people.
