New Service Benefits Added to SAP PartnerEdge™ Further Enhance Channel Partner Solution Delivery, Satisfaction and Success
Singapore — SAP Asia Pacific today announced new enhancements to SAP PartnerEdge™, its innovative channel partner program, at a three-city signing ceremony with channel partners throughout the Asia Pacific region. SAP PartnerEdge, which provides enablement, business generation and quality incentives for partners who serve small and midsize enterprises (SMEs), now offers partners additional enablement packages for delivering service to customers, the opportunity to participate in the program’s reward points system, higher margins and additional co-marketing resources. In addition to helping partners more effectively serve customer needs, the PartnerEdge resources have the potential to reduce sales cycles and customer solution deployment times for partners by as much as half.
“Coming from a JDE background we were pleasantly surprised at how quickly we were able to learn the mySAP All-in-One solution and customise it to suit the unique requirements of our first mid-market customer,” said Peter Lander, Managing Director, Courtland. “The tools provided by SAP through SAP PartnerEdge significantly reduced the investment we needed to make to launch our mySAP All-in-One reseller business.”
Towards Tripling SME Customers by 2010
SAP Asia Pacific’s goal is to triple the number of customers through quality channel partners by 2010. The enhanced SAP Partner Edge program makes it easier and more enticing for partners to do business with SAP and further aligns SAP and its partners toward the long-term satisfaction of SME customers. Working through the SAP PartnerEdge program, partners can more successfully and profitably deliver certified fixed-scope, fixed-cost and fixed-time solutions to meet the increasing demand from SME customers throughout Asia Pacific. In Q2 2006 alone, this demand led to the addition of more than five new SAP SME customers every working day in the region, excluding Japan.
New SAP Partner Service Benefits Package for Quality Customer Support
Addressing a key issue for current and prospective partners, SAP is introducing a comprehensive package of technical support, service and educational enablement benefits to help partners deliver a high level of solution support for their customers. The SAP Partner Service Benefits Package includes:
– Proactive Technical Advice – comprises a single point of contact, a Partner Services Advisor (PSA), for all technical and SAP PartnerEdge inquiries. The PSA will take the initiative of reaching out to the partner to offer a variety of enablement services, thus ensuring that partner employees are aware of the latest SAP application enhancements, upgrade and industry trends.
– Technical Services – the PSA will put the partner in touch with multiple SAP experts within the SAP organization, who will support the development, implementation and operations of your SAP software-based solutions.
– Enablement Support – thru the PSA or the SAP Channel Partner Portal the partner has access to technical enablement and SAP PartnerEdge program support, with a focus on general how-to-questions
– Knowledge Transfer – 24/7 access to online self-service business and technical education which leverages 30-plus years of SAP expertise and industry knowledge. These offerings include role-based curricula, which enable partner employees to develop new skills and talents, and encompass the Services e-learning components launched with the announcement of the SAP PartnerEdge program.
“We build our business one customer success at a time,” said Tan Aik Ping, managing director, Ledge Consulting. “The new benefits package will help us ensure a high level of quality beginning with initial engagement and over the entire life cycle of solution deployment.”
New online self-service partner relationship management
A core new component of SAP PartnerEdge provides partners with an online system that allows them to proactively and easily manage their relationship with SAP. Incorporating many functions into one easy-to-use system, the online resource provides partners with vital information that helps them track their program status including their PartnerEdge Value Points balance and the number of people in their company who have completed required sales and technical training. Partners can use the Web-based system to manage and maintain their profile and contact information and subscribe to communications. Additionally, they can manage market development funds and related marketing activities.
Valuable Partners
The PartnerEdge program’s unique “Value Points” system recognizes and rewards partners for performance and capability-building activities in addition to sales volume, which provides more opportunities for partners of various sizes and types to advance up the program’s three-level structure—Associate, Silver and Gold. Additionally, the program is designed to support the key role of independent software vendor (ISV) partners by supporting and rewarding solution development, certification and qualification activities in an effort to expand the availability of partner-developed add-on solutions in the market.
Partners attaining Gold level status include:
* Hand Enterprise Solutions Ltd.- China
* Daebo System Co., Ltd.- Korea
* Bridge Solution Group Co., Ltd.- Korea
Partners attaining Silver level status include:
* Covics Business Solution Co., Ltd.- China
* Compass Business Solutions Ltd.- Hong Kong
* Sabre Information Services Pte Ltd- Singapore
* Inecom Pte Ltd – Singapore
* The World Management Pte Ltd – Singapore
* Biztech & Ektimo – Korea
* Morning Data Communication – Korea
* Taiwan Auto – Taiwan
“Our channel partners enable us to offer SME customers what they need when they need it in ‘rightsized’ solutions deployed incrementally,” said Pranay Mital, director, SME Indirect Channels, SAP Asia Pacific. “SAP PartnerEdge offers a world-class program of unprecedented business building resources to these valued extensions of our business, while further aligning our joint efforts to deliver maximum customer value. SAP is now a firmly established SME solution leader and SAP PartnerEdge will further fuel our channel partners’ efforts as we look to triple our SME customer base by 2010.”
For more information about SAP PartnerEdge and how to become an SAP SME channel partner, please visit www.sap.com/channel/join.
