SAP goes after SMBs with new dedicated business group
The reality is that small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) account for nearly half of the world’s gross domestic income. That makes the low-end of the market an unavoidable underpinning for even the largest of vendors, including SAP, which is now going after the ma and pa shops with a dedicated group that will focus entirely on addressing the needs of that segment.
SAP’s newly launched SMB Solutions Group will cater exclusively to organizations with less than 500 employees, according to the business intelligence giant, as well as partners involved in that space. Its mission statement is to provide an entry point for companies in those two categories to consume SAP’s burgeoning portfolio of managed services, which constitute the foundation of its long-term growth strategy.
It’s no coincidence that the public cloud is the reason that the SMB market has become such a lucrative destination for vendors in the first place. The pay-as-you-go model makes technologies once only accessible to large enterprises, including SAP’s very own HANA, the in-memory database on which its cloud lineup is based, available at a fraction of the cost required to set up and maintain an in-house installation.
As a result, smaller companies are flocking to the cloud, creating new revenue opportunities that the SMB Solutions Group has been tasked with capitalizing. The effort will be spearheaded by division head Dean Mansfield, a software veteran who had most recently served as the president of worldwide field operations for UK-based software-as-a-service provider Emailvision. Before that, he held senior positions at cloud marketing firm SmartFocus, NetSuite and others.
Mansfield bring a total of more than 20 years of industry experience to SAP, and in addition to the SMB Solutions Group, he has been put in charge of SAP’s Business One application portfolio. Mansfield will be responsible for accelerating the adoption of the lineup and two key components in particular: the cloud services and the SMB-optimized version of HANA included in the bundle.
photo credit: hamur0w0 via photopin cc
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