SAP's Infill Strategy--New Details
SAP has been selling primarily into its installed base for some
time, now.
Recent conversations suggest that SAP no longer sees this as some
temporary
aberration. Instead, it sees the problem of infill--finding more
to sell to
the same customers--as the essential problem to solve.
Conversations last week with several SAP personnel can help us
to understand
some short term and long term aspects of this strategy.
Long term, it has become clear that SAP sees its future in infrastructure.
At Markets last week, the conversation was not about B2B, it was
all
integration frameworks and app servers and Hasso's speech at the
Java
convention.
For SAP, retreating from B2B and returning to bytes and memory
allocation is
a very good thing. They are strong technically, and they have never
demonstrated that they understand B2B.
One odd effect of this is that it now seems highly unlikely that
Portals
will be spun back out. Portals is part of SAP's infrastructure play,
and the
new apps-on-apps that Portals showed off are planned to be the next
big
thing after the infrastructure play.
Short term, the most important fact is that the infill strategy
does not
mean a change in revenue allocation. SAP remains committed to partner
strategies. Currently, SAP salespeople can't get any commission
for service
revenue unless they meet their license quota.
Since license revenue remains difficult to accumulate in small
bites, SAP
has thrown its named account salespeople one bone. They now get
to sell the
Portals products. Since these products are quite different from
the core SAP
products, and since the named account salespeople have no knowledge
of how
to sell them, I'm not sure it helps. Indeed, it may slow sales somewhat.
See also our other
recent Short Takes.
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