SAP Canada announced that Conrad Mandala has expanded his role to lead the channel teams in North America, responsible for delivering the SAP Business One application for small businesses.
In his new role, in addition to his current post as vice-president of SME channels, Mandala is also the new vice-president of SAP Business One for SAP North America. Mandala will be responsible for delivering the SAP Business One application for small businesses. With that he will manage reseller operations, partner development and drive new indirect go-to-market strategies for the product line.
SAP has been gradually growing its SME business globally and in Canada with more than 35,000 customers. This business makes up more than 70 per cent of its overall customer base – and more than 2,300 partners in this segment.
Mandala, the Queen’s Golden Gael hall of famer, told CDN that he has been working on improving channel capacity in the SME partner network along with the customer base in Canada.
In the past six months, SAP Canada added 60 new customers for SAP Business One alone. Globally, more than 20,000 customers use SAP Business One.
<Accroding to Mandala, the SME market is one of the fastest-growing segments globally, and SAP is more committed than ever to bringing the power of our applications to small businesses and mid-size companies across Canada and around the world.
Mandala will continue to report to Mark Aboud, the newly named president and managing director of SAP Canada along with Steven Smith, vice president, U.S. Channels, SAP.
SAP also launched a worldwide initiative called the SAP Extended Business program in an attempt to further ease collaboration among SAP channel partners and other non-partner companies in order to benefit its growing number of SME customers.
The new program try to identify and promote opportunities in the SME space during all phases of sales and implementation for the channel partners. It will also contain promotion, marketing and a process of implementation for selected SAP and partner solutions in collaboration with an authorized VARs.
Under the SAP Extended Business program, members will be granted the appropriate access to SAP systems, resources and training to support their business relationship with their VAR.
With the new global program, SAP is trying to ratchet up its channel ecosystem specifically targeted at the SME, which currently comprise more than 2,100 partners of various categories.