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.
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.
Project Horizon officially comes to market as EMC LEAP, next-gen cloud-native content apps sold on a SaaS model. While available free through a Loyalty Program to existing Documentum customers, the intent here is to greatly expand the customer base downmarket, with the aid of an expanded channel.
Business has been booming at enterprise Sync and Share vendor Syncplicity since they were spun out of EMC last year. Now they are unveiling a new content migration tool to simplify and automate migrations to their platform, and which the customer can also license to maintain permanent birectional access.
A key part of this is a major strengthening of the Epicor channel, including in the United States, where it has always been a small proportion of sales. Significant programmatic initiatives will be coming this fall.
At its customer event, ERP vendor Epicor laid out its plans to become a cloud-first company, to which it asserted a strong commitment – even though the transition is greatly complicated by multiple factors.
Epicor has doubled the size of its Canadian business over the last couple years, and while most of its business in the U.S. is direct, the growing Canadian business is going entirely through channel partners.
Joe Cowan told Epicor’s Customer Conference in Las Vegas that the company is committed to major changes to its systems and products, to take customers into the cloud and become easier to do business with.
Over the last two years, Red Hat Canada has transformed from a primarily-direct organization to one where the channel increasingly leads the way.
DH2i partners with Rackspace to make its container management software available as a cloud offering for SQL. They see potential to expand with other cloud provider partners, and with other Microsoft software, and see it as a valuable managed service for their own partners.
Red Hat wants to grow its business dramatically over next five years, including tripling revenues through channel partners.
Stratoscale, which emphasizes its ability to deliver cloud economics to the data centre – rather than the hyperconverged nature of its technology – also made the formal announcement of its PartnerFirst Program for its channel, which is its sole route to market.
Accellion joins the Microsoft Cloud Storage Partner Program, allowing its kiteworks platform to allow users to create or access Office 365 files from any device without having to save or upload the file back to the original content source.
The series, done in collaboration with IDC and available as free downloads, will continue with a new chapter every month until the final one rolls out at WPC in July.
Daly talks about how the deal will change offerings and markets available to both LANDESK and AppSense partners, and how the integration of the two channels is likely to roll out.
The multi-cloud application delivery solutions vendor has been focused mainly on public cloud infrastructure providers, but they are broadening out into the enterprise, and see Nutanix, with its strong presence in private and hybrid clouds, as a key route to market there.
TmaxSoft, whose value proposition is feature parity and a better price than database management incumbents, opened a Canadian office in January, and is actively looking to add strong partners in Canada.
