A one-off could turn into an annual meeting.
The two-day summit held on May 19 and 20 in Sydney brought SAP Business One solution partners from around the world together with the 14 regional SAP resellers, including FUJIFILM Microchannel Services from New Zealand.
“Generally, the feeling was it was one of the best events of its type and we should follow up and do it again,” says Mark Loveys, Director of Enprise (now operating as Eralis), an SAP Business One solution partner, and Chairman of the product’s Solution Partner Advisory Council. “I have found that other council members would like to do this in their regions as well.”
“The Australian partners thought it was great to be able to meet directly with solution partners in person. They formed a lot of relationships.”
Loveys says that about 60 people attended the event, following a relatively brief but furious online campaign to drum up interest from SAP Business One solution partners scattered over the world to come to Australia.
“ANZ is only 25 million people,” says Loveys. “It is a small region and a lot of travelling, so I had to argue that it is a high-value population and we are early adopters of software solutions. We are a proactive market in the SME area, and I promised it would be worth their while to come down.” According to Loveys, SAPs ANZ resellers are among the highest revenue generating resellers in the world “per partner”.
The genesis of the summit sprang out of a similar event in August 2010, hosted by SAPs American User Group. Loveys wanted to run an event where he could gather all of SAPs ANZ resellers in one place.
“We sort of realized that being one solution partner, we don’t have much drawing power,” Loveys says. “So we took the idea back to the council and asked if they wanted to come down to ANZ. We said we would invite all the resellers in ANZ to meet with us and demonstrate the different solutions.”
By February this year, Loveys had gotten help from SAPs Richard Duffy to build momentum, and financial support, including some sponsorship from HP.
“We used social media and a website to promote the event,” says Loveys. “The interesting thing is when we started showing the partners who else is going, the more people wanted to go.”
Loveys has been a member of the Advisory Council since 2005. He says he has had more time to focus on developing SAP business since the Enprise Group sold its EMS-Cortex organization to Citrix.
Enprise Software (now operating as Eralis Software) sells job costing software for the SAP Business One application through 100 resellers in the northern hemisphere, Australia and New Zealand.
Source: Reseller News