OpenText has historically been mainly a direct player, but is looking to leverage its strong partnership and personal relationships with SAP, and its relationship with SAP partner Accenture to build up its channel business in Canada.
Michael Cybala, OpenText’s VP Product Management, Enterprise Product Unit
ORLANDO — It has been a good SAPPHIRE NOW for OpenText, the Waterloo ON- headquartered global enterprise information management giant. OpenText won the 2016 SAP Pinnacle Award for Application Innovation Partner of the Year – the ninth straight year the long-time SAP partner has won a Pinnacle. OpenText also announced the availability of OpenText solution extensions for the SAP S/4HANA business suite. Last, and not least, OpenText also indicated that it is leveraging its partnership with SAP, and core SAP partner Accenture, to build out its own channel further, strengthening a partner route to market that has not been a significant part of the company’s business in the past.
“We are a very strategic SAP partner, with a long history and broad portfolio of SAP-related solutions, including ones in archiving, enterprise contact management and digital asset management,” said Michael Cybala, OpenText’s VP Product Management, Enterprise Product Unit. “As SAP pushes deeper into HANA on the database level as well as S/4 HANA, as SAP’s key ISV partner for Enterprise Content Management, we are the first SAP partner in this area to certify the S/4 HANA Suite.”
OpenText now provides a certified SAP content management portfolio designed to run smoothly on SAP S/4HANA, which is fully supported and sold by SAP. They have also extended the SAP HANA database support across the portfolio, and adopted SAP Fiori software to enhance user experience across their own product portfolio.
“Customers can have confidence that all the OpenText elements will work fully in the HANA environment,” Cybala said. These solution extensions include capabilities for decommissioning legacy applications, archiving data and documents, embedding digital content-enabled workflows into mobile UIs, and establishing a digital content strategy for the digital core, aligned with SAP HANA, SAP Fiori and SAP S/4HANA.
“We are already showing a vendor invoice management solution we co-developed with SAP for S/4 HANA on the show floor here at SAPPHIRE NOW,” Cybala stated.
Beyond the important contours of their partnership, OpenText is also looking to SAP to render important assistance in another way – the development of their own partner channel.
Conrad Mandala, Regional Vice President, Canada, OpenText
“Our partner channel has never been a strong component of our business,” said Conrad Mandala, Regional Vice President, Canada, at OpenText. “However, I ran the channel at SAP Canada for eight years, and am eager to see OpenText’s channel become an engine for growth.”
Mandala said the SAP relationship will be critical to this effort.
“Our partnership with SAP and my personal relationship with John Graham, who was appointed as Managing Director of SAP Canada several months ago, will be the rebirth of our growth engine,” Mandala said. “He and I have an active engagement working our two teams to grow our business, which speaks to the strong relationships that we have. We have also hired more business development people specific to the SAP relationship.”
OpenText is also developing its relationship with global systems integrator Accenture, a key SAP partner.
“We are now working with Accenture in the hybrid digital management space, and we are making a commitment for all three organizations to work strongly together,” Mandala said.
“The beauty of the Canadian marketplace that is we are all going after the same several hundred customers, but until now, we have not invested strongly enough in a channel architecture to develop these relationships. With these changes we are making, our pipeline is substantially bigger, and I see the growth resulting from this in the millions in the near future.”
