SAP has small business in its sights

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Including mySAP users, SAP now claims to have 17,800 small and medium-sized business customers around the globe. The company said the announcement strengthened its position in the SME segment, one of its key strategic areas for future growth.

Marc O’Dwyer, managing director at SAP Business One master reseller Irish International Sales (IIS), was keen to reflect the vendor’s global success onto the Irish market. He said there was “a lot more awareness from companies” and Business One was featuring “on their shopping list”.

He claimed to be “winning a lot of business over and above the usual suspects in that space”. A reflection of the product’s performance in the Irish market was that IIS was the biggest SAP partner in the UK and Ireland even though 75 to 80 per cent of its business was in Ireland.

Business One is described as an enterprise, large corporate solution at a price and a rollout more suited to the small business sector. It claims to give customers the same management information available to large corporations out of the box.

According to O’Dwyer, the inclusion of finance, multi-currency, inbuilt CRM, HR, services management module and accounting out of the box makes it very well-priced for the features customers get.

The 10,000th customer, Rajiv Plastics Industries, is a manufacturer of colour master batches for commodity and engineering plastics in Mumbai, India.

Donna Troy, executive vice president for global indirect channels at SAP AG, described the milestone as “a tribute to the value SAP Business One delivers and to the successful growth and influence of our channel partners. This is especially hard won in a business focused on long-term partnerships with our customers, not on shrinkwrap software sales”.

In a statement accompanying the announcement, Robert P. Anderson, vice president of research at Gartner, argued many small and midsize businesses were realizing the advantages of adopting enterprise management applications “instead of relying on disparate packages for components including accounting, inventory management and others, or spreadsheets to make important business decisions”.

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