SAP to generate more than 40% revenue through partners by 2015

SAP Labs India the second largest Research & Development and Global Services & Support center in the world aims at achieving 40 percent of the total revenue from its partners across the country.

SAP Labs India researches, designs, and delivers leading-edge software applications that enhance and extend SAP solutions, and is recognized within the SAP global organization as one of the prime contributors to innovation, quality and service.

Nandagopal B Prasad, Global Head of Partner Qualification and Certification, SAP labs India, said: "We plan to have 40 percent of total revenue that SAP makes coming through channel partners. We target to have 45000 trained partner consultants in SAP areas by 2015."

While speaking to DQ Channels, Prasad said that SAP has worked closely with partners to make their own products better from theirn partner's implementation experience. "Here we actually invite partners to validate 250 products before release", he said.

Further elaborating on focus areas for development, Prasad said, " The other most improtant area of development for us is the infrastructure and hardware. We provide all the certifications to all the hardware products that we get from partners such as IBM, HP."

SAP also certify partners globally for running operations for SAP. Like certification for hosting, application management services, business processing.

Asked on what opportunities do SAP provides to software solution partners in terms of certification, he said, "Any partner can actually come for certification, and also it does need to be only partners, any company can come for certification. So, once they get certified from us, they immediately get visibility on a global platform. And then, of course, if they want, it requires the least investment to partner with us."

Prasad also pointed out that there is a very high engagement model probably the highest solution that a partner can get in SAP, it is called solution extension. In this the partner product is based on SAP price list. Few examples are products from Adobe, OpenText which are based on SAP price list.

These products are sold by the SAP and then whatever the revenue share is decided as per the contract is given to the partner. This means that these products have access to all the markets where SAP operates.

In parallel to all these trends and technology focus Prasad explained that the company has also streamlined its existing partners strategy, which is now more simple and clear in terms of selection of its partners. To enhance partner relationships, SAP India conducts several events throughout the year like SAP forum and other such events.