SAP Canada Inc. has announced that Conrad Mandala, vice-president of SME Channels with SAP Canada, has expanded his role to lead the channels teams in North America that will be responsible for delivering the SAP Business One application for small businesses.

Business One is sold exclusively through the channel and Mandala will take all the work done in Canada over the last two and half years and use those best practices to gain growth in the United States.

“Canada has been recognized globally as one of the lead countries from a growth perspective, partner satisfaction perspective and customer satisfaction perspective,” said Mandala.”We want to bring to the U.S. many of those things that we’ve done in order to help the U.S. get some of the growth seen in Canada.”

One of Mandala’s plans is to develop a partner enablement team that has been successful in Canada and bring that to the U.S.

“We took a stance that it was important for partners to grow their competencies and they are not expected to do it themselves,” he added

Also, there will be a focus on marketing programs in terms of developing SAP’s lead and demand generation programs. One way to do that is through SAP’s PartnerEdge program, which has a strong MDF component.

“We are really working on getting a much higher usage of MDF on lead and demand generation through our partners. Canada has the highest utilization rate of those MDF dollars and we are going to try and drive that in the U.S. to help partners grow their business down there,” explained Mandala.

Mandala has been in his new role since May and said that it will take some time to establish some of his initiatives and has set short-term, medium-term and long-term goals he wants to accomplish.

In the short-term, Mandala has removed the cost of training for partners for the balance of the year, which will immediately help with partner enablement and education. “We are doing that because we believe strongly that getting our partners up to speed faster and getting them access to the great learning tools we have will provide us great benefits.”

In the medium-term, Mandala will be working on lead and demand generation with partners who could see benefits six months down the line.

In the longer term, Mandala wants to grow SAP’s channel through such things as leveraging the large enterprise ecosystem. “Business One provides our large enterprise customers with much more different cost-effective ways to use ERP around the world so we will see some growth there and better route to the market.”

Despite this expanded role, Mandala will remain responsible for managing reseller operations, partner development and driving the indirect go-to-market strategy for SAP solutions targeted at small businesses and midsize companies in Canada.

eChannelLine: Vanessa Ho
Published: Thursday, September 04, 2008

Originally posted 2008-09-06 02:20:40. Republished by Blog Post Promoter