Creating Profit Through Alliances - business models for collaboration E-book | Page 50

the number of parties offering similar technology,
and the number of potential customers. Since 2006,
several large auctions of patents have been held that
attempted to bring together as many providers and
potential customers as possible, with a view to

creating a more predictable market and more
transparent pricing processes. This could yield an
initial guideline for comparable patents. However, the
vast majority of intellectual property rights are still
traded privately.

SAP
SAP is best known for its Enterprise Resource
Planning and supply chain management software
system. In recent years the company has evolved into
a multi-product company, with software to support all
kinds of business processes in all major industries.
The mission is: „help companies of all sizes to run
better‟. “A strong and growing partner ecosystem is
one of the cornerstones of the company‟s strategy”,
as Erast Wortel, alliance manager for SAP, explains.
“We are a real engineering company, with many
product innovations, such as the recently introduced
In Memory technology by Hasso Plattner, one of the
founders and largest shareholder of SAP. He was one
of the five ex-IBM engineers that started to build
software for ICI, which was the starting point of SAP.
Since then SAP has grown through the focus on
specific industries and through our partner strategy.”
SAP has a global alliance organisation with a close
alignment to the local country strategy. Most effort is
focused on large enterprises in a parallel selling
model. SAP sells its software products, the partner
does the implementation. There is no referral fee, as
the cost of implementation is in many cases at least
three times the cost of the software. This gives
enough incentive to the partners.
In the Netherlands, where Erast Wortel is based,
there are around 6,000 SAP consultants. The largest
system integrators have around 500 consultants each.
The competition for SAP‟s products comes from
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Microsoft and Oracle and many niche players.
Traditionally clients first select the software suite, and
after that the implementation partner. However, as
the implementation partners have extensive
customer contacts, they can influence the software
selection process as well.
Wortel explains: “We try to influence the customers
through a combined effort of the SAP (pre-)sales and
partner sales team. One of the key goals of our
alliance strategy is to create a compelling joint offer.
This joint offer should change the traditional
acquisition process of customers by demonstrating
that it creates more or faster value than the
individual offerings of the partners and that of the
competition.
For example with Accenture and Ordina we have an
integrated solution for mortgage providers. This is not
an exclusive agreement, but we jointly approach all
relevant banks. We now have some dozens of these
solutions If we are able to do this well we do not
need to compete with individual software companies,
but only with other (mini) ecosystems that can offer
a better joint offering.”
The customer decides who has the lead in the
implementation project. Often one of the parties is
asked to be the main contractor for the services. In
the large enterprise segment SAP delivers the
software directly