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SAP is pushing hard to simplify procurement of its HANA offerings with new types of agreements with long time partners Accenture and HP.
SAP and Accenture will be packaging up SAP HANA-based solutions and Accenture services to create end to end industry or function-specific solutions, including hardware where necessary. What’s different is that everything will be under a single contract which Accenture will handle and it will be the single point of contact for clients. The first offering under the new business model is the Marketing Performance Solution which is aimed at chief marketing officers (CMOs) in the retail and consumer goods space. It neatly targets two growth areas – packaged industry solutions, and CMOs who are the new (soft underbelly?) target for suppliers selling into enterprises.
Over at HP, SAP and HP are delivering the HP-as-a-Service solution for HANA for big data analytics, which bundles the HANA license with HP hardware and on-going management and is paid for via a single subscription fee. It will run in HP’s Managed Cloud environment and is part of SAP’s push to put HANA in the cloud.
These agreements are the latest in a line of new procurement methods offered by SAP, which also include partner and Amazon hosted offerings. They start to tackle two problems which we think are hindering HANA adoption – as a technology HANA has almost endless application areas but potential customers don’t have the resources to explore use cases so need ready-made solutions, and there is a dearth of HANA skills. For all its apparent success, HANA is still a tiny percentage of SAP’s revenue and it needs to increase that rapidly (see SAP sees software sales drop). Innovating around procurement and contracts is one approach - and it will put pressure on competitors to think differently too.
