“We want our channel partners to be more equipped and capture the market opportunities by addressing the future digital needs of our customers and prospects. To support this, we are investing in knowledge sharing capabilities and initiatives such as the Partner Advisory Board aims to drive business with partners for mutual benefit,” said Avinash Kumar Purwar, vice president, global partner operations, SAP Indian Subcontinent.

“Customers have been at our core throughout SAP’s two decades in India and expansion to our partner strategy further strengthens our commitment to the ecosystem.”

The Partner Advisory Board, which will work closely with user group INDUS to address customers’ business needs using new solution and provide the extended partner network with insights to help expand the customer base, has 11 representatives from the partner ecosystem:

• Chida Barat – CEO, Zieta Technologies
• Prashant Pansare – Managing Director, Inteliment Technologies Pvt. Ltd
• Venugopal Uppalapati – Chairman, vCentric Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
• Mike Dhall – CEO, ZenFocus Software Pvt. Ltd.
• Rakesh Barik – Technology Leader, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. Ltd.
• Mohan Ramanan – General Manager and Head – Business Applications, Wipro Limited
• Sanjeev Deshpande – Managing Director, iTelligence India Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
• Andy Stevenson – CEO, Fujitsu India Pvt. Ltd.
• Anindya Basu – Country Managing Director, Accenture Services India Pvt. Ltd.
• Balakrishna Navaluri – Chief Operating Officer, Yash Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
• Arnab Basu – Technology Consulting and Digital Leader, PwC India Pvt. Ltd.

SAP India also plans to build capability among its partners, particularly in cloud solutions such as SuccessFactors, Ariba, Analytics and customer engagement and commerce solutions such as Hybris. The company has committed to increase investment in this enablement through initiatives such as the SAP Partner Sales Academy, SAP Presales Certification Drive and SAP Platinum Academy.

Further, SAP India plans to move to a 100 per cent partner-led go-to-market strategy for its SME business. While currently partners facilitate 70 cent of SAP India’s SME business, the company will implement focused programs to grow this proportion, as well as expand deeper into non-metro locations in India.

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According to an eMarketer study, B2C e-commerce sales in China grew by 63.8 per cent in 2014, leaps ahead of any other country in the world (Australian e-commerce growth was 5.7 per cent). The SAP Anywhere solution will take advantage of this growth by allowing SMBs to create online stores in minutes, and have a full set of  features available via the cloud or mobile devices. These include inventory control and insight, online marketplace management, and business and customer engagement.

According to SAP, vendors, customers and partners can access shared inventory and logistics insights in real time through unified order management software, and integrate internal and external back-office sources to generate analytics. From a customer perspective, it provides an integrated digital product showroom to be easily accessed via mobile devices, as well as campaign marketing functions.

China Telecom, which has had an ongoing collaboration with SAP, worked with the vendor to customise SAP Anywhere for the Chinese market within its telecommunications infrastructure. It will be provided as a software-as-a-service solution by China Datacom, a subsidiary of China Comservice, in a public cloud.

On the collaboration, Gao Tongqing, deputy general manager, China Telecom, said, “The impact that mobile e-commerce has brought to China becomes deeper as time goes on. Ergo, it is our obligation to think and act before our customers do, and fulfil their potential need for e-commerce, even help them to transform to e-commerce. We believe SAP Anywhere will play an active and important role in helping our customers achieve business growth.”

Plans for SAP Anywhere in China were first announced at SAPPHIRE NOW 2015.

China Telecom has had a strong focus on providing technology China’s SMBs for some time, signing a three-year agreement in August with IBM to deliver cloud-based SAP applications to businesses.

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The partnership will help Malaysian SMEs adopt best-in-class business applications without the complexity and cost of on-premise infrastructure with the assurance of security, compliance, performance and efficiency.

“With SAP Business One Cloud, we answered our clients’ call for an ERP solution that was quick to deploy and easy to run and maintain. By moving those solutions into the cloud, we are addressing their demand for more flexibility, security and cost savings,” said Suhaimee Abu Hassan, founder and CEO of Anise Asia.

For Virtustream, the alliance extends the reach of its cloud IaaS, software and cloud professional services into the high-growth ASEAN market through a Master Distribution Agreement, which will allow Anise Asia to sell Virtustream’s software portfolio through the region.

Virtustream’s SAP certification is another advantage of the partnership, and it cites early results showing that SAP’s response time can improve by over 30 per cent when running on Virtustream’s cloud.

SAP Malaysia managing director Bernard Chiang said Malaysian SMEs will be empowered by the service offering from Anise Asia and Virtustream.

“Our partners are an extension of the SAP network and, quite often with their local knowledge and expertise, play the critical role of fulfilling the ‘last mile’ of implementation; hence, laying the path for local SMEs to be empowered with innovative ways to reach new customers, maximise efficiency, and drive profitable growth. With SAP Business One Cloud, SMEs can then look forward to better management in every aspect of their operations – from sales and customer relationships to financials and operations,” said Chiang.

The post Anise Asia launches SAP B1 Cloud offering in Malaysia, partners with Virtustream appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

As a company founded three years ago, the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 organising committee needed an application that was simple, quick to implement, cost-efficient and would help it scale up quickly to deliver a tournament with expected attendance of 1 million fans and more than 1 billion followers globally.

Luke Spano, financial controller, ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, said, “When we started to look for a system, they key things for us were that it had to be dynamic and flexible, and have the ability to report across different budget levels, across three different currencies – Australian, New Zealand and US dollars.”

Despite having a complex charter of accounts across event and host budgets, SAP Business One was implemented in just over six and a half weeks.

Accessing all data from one location has given the organising committee much-needed flexibility.

“Being able to conduct all of our reporting needs, such as daily ticketing reports, from any location is not only critical but adds real business value to the entire organisation,” Spano said.

“As we got closer to the tournament we had to make decisions instantly. And now we are in the midst of it, we can’t afford to wait before we act. Having real-time data and insight is empowering all of our business groups to make the accurate and immediate decisions that are crucial to the success of the ICC Cricket World Cup.”

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