Made up of 50 members, United VARs is a SAP Platinum Partner, with members in 90 countries. They boast 100 SAP solutions and 250 add-ons with their network enabling local and international projects, aimed very much at the SAP mid market.

The alliance voted to support the project after Managing Director Detlef Mehlmann witnessed the devastating effects felt by students without fresh water. According to water.org, Cambodia is one of the countries worst affected by a lack of clean water. Mehlmann stated:

“The schools face disastrous hygienic conditions… There is no drinking water. No toilets. No chance to even wash hands. The students carry plastic bottles filled with water from dirty rivers. It was disconcerting to learn this was the rule and not the exception. Almost all the children suffer from diarrhea, and, unfortunately, many of them die under the age of 12.”

That’s where Project: WASH (Water, Sanitary Facilities, and Hygiene training) comes in. Managed by German organization Kleine Hilfsaktion, the project currently has already provided sanitation and drinking water for over 3,000 students in 21 schools. To fund clean water in each school costs approximately 15,000 Euros, which goes to construction of rainwater collection tanks and bio sand filtration, sanitation training, testing, maintenance and more.

After seeing one of these projects in Cambodia, Mehlmann moved to fund Project: Wash with United VARs leadership. They agreed to support fundraising for further schools. Under the campaign, each member of United VARs will contribute 0.1{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of reported revenue for Q2 of the year. This is bolstered by a direct contribution of 20,000 Euros by SAP.

“That was the easiest way to make sure all members could help… At the end of the day, it is a voluntary initiative, but I’m quite pleased to see such a positive response.”

According to Mehlmann, the aim is to provide water for at least one new school, but with the overwhelmingly positive response, they may be able to fund a second.

“I’m trying to be conservative… It’s a bit of a challenge. We’re working with SAP to help spread the word. I’m thankful for the support we’ve received so far.”

Read more about Project: WASH here

Find out more about United VARs here

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“Achieving this certification is a key differentiator in the marketplace for itelligence,” said Lars Janitz, executive vice president, head of global managed services, itelligence AG.

The Partner Centre of Expertise certification, provided by the SAP Digital Business Services organisation, encompasses a partner’s entire support organisation, including staff, processes, and infrastructure.

The certification verifies that a partner’s support organisation meets the minimum requirements needed to provide high-quality support services to its customers for SAP Business All-in-One, SAP Analytics solutions, SAP HANA, SAP mobile solutions, database and technology solutions, and SAP Hybris Commerce. The certification is mandatory for all partners selling, providing, and delivering compliant customer support processes.

itelligence achieved its first Partner Centre of Expertise certification for its support centre in 2012 and this year subsidiaries in 19 countries took part in the certification and recertification processes. Recertification is required every two years. To qualify, itelligence uses SAP Solution Manager as a key element of its support infrastructure.

“Our global strategy, focused on SAP software implementations, continues to bear fruit,” said Janitz, adding, “SAP has certified our support organisation as a Partner Centre of Expertise repeatedly. Through this important recognition, SAP confirms to our customers that we provide top-quality service and support – at the technical and process level.”

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The packages will be built and delivered by partners combining their own services and intellectual property with SAP solutions. The solutions will be promoted via an SAP-qualified partner-packaged solution finder on SAP.com, so that smaller customers can more easily find and access partners who can assist.

“The main goal of the new strategy is to offer customers a wider set of solutions to meet their individual requirements within an affordable price range,” said Karl Fahrbach, head of global channels, SAP.

“As the SAP solution portfolio has grown with the addition of line-of-business solutions and is increasingly focused on the cloud, there is a need for a broader approach to solution packaging that is not only focused on enterprise resource planning software or limited to on-premise solutions.

Partners will be able to offer the new packages based on SAP Business ByDesign, SAP S/4HANA and S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP’s customer engagement and commerce solutions, including SAP Hybris, and SAP Leonardo capabilities.

The offering is the latest move in an ongoing campaign by SAP to overcome perceptions that its solutions are only for the ‘big end of town’ and enlist the partner community in its efforts to better engage with SMEs.

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SUSE and AWS extended their relationship in an effort to satisfy increasing demand for the agility and cost savings of cloud-based business-critical applications. The previous agreement, which commenced in 2014, allowed AWS to resell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on AWS Marketplace.

“Tens of thousands of enterprises around the world, spanning major industries, count on SUSE for their mission-critical computing environments, including those running SAP workloads,” said Naji Almahmoud, vice president, Global Alliances, SUSE. “The marketplace can expect continued collaboration, which will enable us to meet and surpass customers’ demanding requirements for SAP workloads on AWS.”

“We are excited to extend our relationship with SUSE to offer SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications on AWS Marketplace,” said Bas Kamphuis, general manager, Amazon Web Services, Inc.

The increased level of collaboration bodes well for the future as many large enterprise customers currently use SUSE solutions to develop, test and run their production SAP workloads on AWS and SAP HANA workloads on AWS have been increasing since the release of X1 and X1e.32xlarge Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

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The awards were presented in categories encompassing sales, innovation, technology and services. Nominations were based on SAP’s internal sales data, and a steering committee of regional and global SAP representatives determined winning partners according to criteria such as sales achievement and performance.

The Asia Pacific Japan regional winners were:

• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud: Cloud4C
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP SuccessFactors Solutions: Presence of IT
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP Ariba Solutions: SGN Software, India
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for Concur Solutions: IBM, Japan
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP Hybris Solutions: UXC Oxygen
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for General Business Top Sell Partner: Sonata Information Technology, India
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SME Solutions: Global Infonet, India
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for Most Innovative Digital Transformation Success Story: Accenture
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP Leonardo: Deloitte
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP S/4HANA: Sonata Software Limited, India
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP S/4HANA Cloud: Deloitte
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for SAP Solution Extensions: Utopia Inc.
• SAP APJ Award for Partner Excellence for Partner Managed Cloud: Fujitsu, Japan

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With this newly attained status, along with the company’s SAP Competency status, YASH will provide cloud solutions to their customers, including migrations of existing SAP solutions to the cloud and S/4HANA adoptions.

Hard Vyakarnam, vice president – global alliances, YASH Technologies, said, “We are excited to foster our relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The Advanced Consulting Partner status will empower YASH to design, build, migrate and manage workloads and applications on AWS for companies of all sizes while reducing their overall IT costs. Furthermore, it will add tremendous value to our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution and enable enterprise applications that would be highly available, secure, and scalable.”

YASH AWS specialists recently worked together with Salus Finance and to deploy SAP Business solutions on the AWS platform.

”We were looking for flexible, scalable and reliable IT infrastructure that could supplement the rapid growth that we are experiencing while delivering the strong performance needed to run the SAP HANA and BI Analytics applications. After careful evaluation along with YASH we decided on adopting a cloud based strategy,” said Robert A. Bull, COO, AdminaHealth.

“Given the business critical nature of this initiative and the need for robustness and flexibility, we decided to partner with global leaders; Amazon Web Services, world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform and YASH, one of the leading AWS advanced consulting partners. AWS specialists from YASH with their domain and technology proficiency worked closely with our teams to deliver a solution in line with our vision.”

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The alliance has been forged to expand each company’s local success to a global scale with a physical presence in 17 countries. ASA Global will provide end-to-end HR services and solutions including business consulting, system integration, and transactional and continuous improvement services worldwide. The alliance will develop and market best-in-class, cloud-based SAP SuccessFactors-based HR solutions.

“ASA Global will provide a global reach and better customer support for the businesses we all serve,” said Darcy Mark Lalonde, CEO, Synchrony Global.

Based in Singapore with a global delivery centre in Manila, Synchrony Global is an SAP gold partner in Asia-Pacific, recently recognised as the SAP SuccessFactors Partner of the Year for the APJ region and an SAP Pinnacle Award finalist in 2017.

“This partnership allows us to provide our clients with worldwide support during and after their projects, including high-quality implementation and post-go-live services,” said Jean-Christophe Péaudeau, president, Arago Consulting, which is an SAP gold partner in Europe and winner of the France Partner of the Year, 2017.

“This strategic alliance gives us an unparalleled ability to extend our deep expertise in SAP SuccessFactors solutions across the globe,” said William Carroll, CEO, Aasonn, which is a long-standing SuccessFactors partner having worked with more than 2000 customers from its headquarters in Illinois, USA. The company also operates in the UK, Ireland and India.

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According to the company, the new brand also covers two attributes cited by clients as unique to Wipro: “the integrated perspective that Wipro brings across multiple industries, technologies and geographies, and its ability to deliver innovation in ways that are most relevant for clients”.

The company has also reinforced its core values: be passionate about clients’ success, treat each person with respect, be global and responsible, and unyielding integrity in everything we do.

“Our brand identity is a visual expression of what we do and mean, for our clients. And this is directly energised by our values. The values are our core and our beacon, the bedrock of our culture. Our rearticulated values connect and resonate deeply with the new vibrant brand identity,” said Azim Premji, chairman, Wipro Limited.

“The new brand identity marks our journey of transformation in the digital world. Our brand refresh signals an even closer engagement with clients, greater innovation, and a deeper impact on their business. It is contemporary, reflecting the diversity and aspirations of our employees.”

According to the company, the new logo represents the way the company “connects the dots” for clients by integrating technology and domain expertise, applying insights from different industries, and delivering integrated end-to-end capabilities and services.

Wipro has over 170,000 employees, with headquarters in New Jersey, United States, and Bangalore, India.

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Awards were presented in a variety of categories including overall sales, innovation, technology, services and solution-specific areas.

Twelve APJ companies received awards, with just two of the awards being presented to a single partner: Indian consultancy firm Cloudway Consulting won as Top SME Partner for Cloud Solutions as well as earning top honours in the category of Ariba Solutions.

The Partner Excellence award for SAP Top Sell Partner went to India-based Sonata, while Top New Sell Partner honours went to India-based Intellect Bizware. TIS was named SAP Top Technology Partner.

Singapore-based Synchrony Global won for SAP SuccessFactors Solutions; Kaisa Consulting picked up the award for SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer Solutions; Presence of IT won for SAP Cloud Customer Success; FastTrack Solutions won for SAP SME Solutions; HPE Software won for SAP Extensions; Abeam won for Partner Managed Cloud; SAP S/4HANA top honours were awarded to vCentric Technologies, while the award for SAP S/4HANA Innovation went to ISTN.

SAP presented a total of 64 awards for the Asia Pacific Japan; Greater China; Europe, Middle East and Africa; Middle and Eastern Europe; Latin America; and North America regions.

Congratulating all recipients, SAP emphasised that partners are critical to its success, and that the awards “are a testament to the amazing work and value that is delivered.”

A steering committee chose all winners from SAP’s worldwide partner base, with nominations based on internal SAP sales data and winners chosen based on multiple criteria such as sales achievement and performance.

The SAP FKOM is SAP’s largest annual sales meeting, bringing together SAP executives, field employees and partners to exchange information and drive success during the upcoming year.

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“The year 2016 has seen tremendous growth for BOARD both in Europe and the US, and our strategic plans call for elevating our US revenues to at least 50 per cent of corporate revenues by 2019,” said BOARD CEO, Giovanni Grossi. “A Boston headquarters underscores our strategic commitment to that US growth with adequate space, staffing and funding to accommodate our rapid growth and expanded enterprise customer base.”

BOARD offers an integrated toolkit approach either on-premise or in the cloud to enable organisations to harness data from multiple sources from relational databases to cloud applications and from Big Data to cloud data stores. BOARD has designed a set of pre-built dedicated data connectors that minimise the time and effort required to access popular data sources such as SAP.

The BOARD SAP Connector enables users to easily access complex SAP data and use it in a single visual and interactive environment. These solutions can be made available enterprise-wide or they can be implemented for one specific area of the company only, such as Finance or Marketing, enabling non-technical users to access their complex SAP data, easily, flexibly and accurately.

BOARD, now on track to exceed 100 per cent growth by the end of the year, has deployed its BI and corporate performance management software platforms at such leading North American companies as Volkswagen, Eversource, Advanced Micro Devices, Cheesecake Factory, Harry & David, BioMarin Pharmaceuticals and Zales Jewelers.

“BOARD’s adoption by so many multi-billion dollar enterprises in the US has been another reason to co-locate our headquarters here in Boston,” said Scott Jennings, general manager, BOARD Americas.

BOARD attributes its explosive growth to increasing understanding of the importance of a unified enterprise-wide software platform for planning, forecasting and BI analytics that support data-driven decision making enterprise-wide.

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