IGEL has been in North America for a while, but the company is now investing considerably more in its key partners and its channel program, to develop a core of elite partners to drive market share growth. They are at Citrix Synergy this week discussing future plans with their partners, who also typically sell Citrix.
Citrix CEO Kiril Tatarinov, at his first Citrix Synergy since taking over the company helm earlier this year, outlined to the company’s customers where he plans to take the company.
AVG continues its strategy of adding more focused, value-added distributors with EarthBend, which brings an MSP background and experience with AVG’s Managed Workplace solution, as well as a strong regional presence in both the American mid-west and Canadian prairies.
Nutanix is making changes to its channel strategies around this product, including deal registration, to avoid channel confusion. Lenovo and its channel will also play a key role taking Xpress to market.
Nutanix’s president acknowledged that the industry’s previous announced attempts at a low-cost VDI solution have been basically junk, which have left customers suspicious of such claims. Nutanix InstantON VDI for Citrix, on the other hand, is an enterprise-capable turnkey solution, which really will come in in the $500 price range, including the endpoint.
SAP and Apigee are both seeing good synergies from their approximately two year-old partnership, the type of ISV alliance strongly being broadly pursued by both companies.
The Lenovo announcements included three joint offerings with integrators around SAP HANA, SAP-related data warehousing and memory announcements, and a hyper-converged sofolution r SAP Business suite applications stemming from their partnership with Nutanix.
SAP Anywhere formally launched in the U.S. this week. But while demand for the small business-focused CRM solution is strong, a change in SAP’s SMB applications strategy has led to the Canadian launch being put on hold for now.
The OCF found that in addition to resolving massively increased complexity in market allocation issues stemming from the growing segmentation of the market, implementing the SAP solution gave them the benefits of CRM for the first time, and enabled them to realize major benefits from going digital.
SAP Canada is thinking about dropping its one billion dollar threshold defining the direct space to the 500-600 million range, but is emphasizing that the idea wouldn’t be to take more business direct, but to make SAP direct resources available to assist partners in the upper half of the SME space.
SAP Business One is fourth in its category with 1.8 per cent market share globally, but its general manager, Luis Murguia, believes a major organizational change which was quietly implemented in April can help to deliver significant growth.
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.
Other Dell SAP-related initiatives announced at SAPPHIRE NOW included ones around the Internet of Things, cloud blueprints to optimize SAP environments, and a new optimized architecture for SAP Foundation for Health.
Hitachi Data Systems has greatly deepened its strategic relationship with SAP around HANA in the last several years, and its new announcements, which cover from the low end of the market to the high, broaden that portfolio.
CEO Bill McDermott didn’t exactly promise a kinder, gentler SAP, but he did pledge a company that will be more empathetic to customers, have a more complete vision, and be more focused on simplicity. He also offered a forecast of some trends he thinks SAP will be well positioned to leverage.
None of the announcements, which included joint validation for SAP HANA on the Azure platform, were earth-shattering, but they do speak to the significance of the relationship between the two long-time allies and how they see the market moving.
Long-time SAPer Scott Jones returns from a short sojourn at another company to take on the job of running SAP’s North American partner network.
The VM-aware storage vendor also announced new predictive analytics capabilities, nine new all-flash model options, and two new cloud offerings.
At its partner event preceding the broader SAPPHIRE conference, SAP previewed a major new cloud program, which will be implemented in three stages, the first of which will be in Q3 and the next two, next year. Details at this point were exceedingly scarce.
Atera’s technology, which facilitates jointly developed RMM and PSA solutions, is designed for the Internet of Things environment, and collects massive amount of sensor data, which it is using in a free BI offering, not just for its own MSP partners, but anyone who wants to use it.
