Hervé Camus-Haessler has joined SAP as the Senior Director of Channel Development across EMEA. He will be responsible for driving innovation with existing and new channel partners in order to broaden SAP's market reach, especially in the mid-market.

"I'm joining the team in order to help SAP to accelerate in terms of channels," Camus told IT Europa. "We're going to focus on the SMB market (for us companies with less than €500m turnover) and particularly on the mid-market, where we see strong traction with our SAP Business All-in-One solutions and complementary offerings, including analytics for business users."

In addition to replacing Christopher Knörr, who has been appointed VP of channels for Asia-Pacific, Hervé Camus was given several transversal responsibilities in order to drive innovation. This appointment reflects SAP's increased commitment to the channel in EMEA. "We really want to innovate," said Camus, "We have the ambition to further energize our channel and teams, and to bring more innovation to our partner ecosystem. We also want to develop our human capital: evolving people and practices to capitalize on the changing market conditions, such as the growing interest for subscription-based offerings. Ultimately, we want to evolve our market leader discipline from product leadership to partner and customer intimacy, further investing in our top strategic partners in order to accelerate our market expansion."

In order to do so, SAP is going to look at what they call "partner landscape optimisation" - "We're going to look at our current ecosystem and analyse the white spaces where we don't have enough coverage from a geographical standpoint or in specific verticals; we're also going to complement our VAR community, both in terms of breadth and depth, investing both in international partners, and in local players, like small system integrators," he explained.

SAP is also going to concentrate on building a self-sufficient channel. "Our partners have been serving customers with a lot of value-added services based on top of our offerings. In the future we would like to enable them to lead in demand-generation activities, and to drive shorter sales cycles with easier to implement offerings -"Fast-Start preconfigured packages enabling the channel partner to sell much more projects so that we can collaboratively build with our ecosystem a true volume business taking advantage of the great synergies between ERP and BI," he concluded.

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