SAP has revealed an aggressive growth target of reaching 100,000 customers worldwide by 2010 and insists the channel has a key role to play in helping it realise its goal.
Donal Madden, channel head at SAP UK, told CRN that the SME sector remained a key focus for the German software vendor.
“We currently have 38,000 customers worldwide so we need to make a radical change to reach our goal of 100,000 by 2010,” he said. “We want to appeal to the SME market and plan to do this largely via the channel. SAP has invested millions in advertising to raise awareness of our offerings among SMEs.
“SAP’s goal is to have 45 per cent of its total revenue derived from the SME sector by 2010. We want 40 per cent of that to come from the channel.”
At the start of last year Madden told CRN that he wanted to increase SAP’s UK partners to about 51 by the end of 2006. SAP now has 60 channel partners under its PartnerEdge channel programme – 40 BusinessOne partners and 20 All-in-One partners.
Although Madden is happy with this figure, he added that he was looking for an “additional partner or two” in the public sector space.
Ian Caswell, managing director of SAP VAR Sapphire, said: “We sell mySAP All-in-One [the mid-range offering] and BusinessOne [the SME offering]. On average we acquire about four new clients a year for All-in-One, whereas for BusinessOne we would get about 30 to 40. BusinessOne is where the real growth will come from. We have close to 90 clients now for this technology.”
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