That SAP decided to pay for customer leads was somewhat surprising to Steve Torres, vice president of business development at Axon Global, a technology consulting and systems integrator and an exclusive SAP partner. Not that his company doesn't welcome the new financial incentives. Torres likens the referral fee to a "reimbursement [from SAP] of your costs to help you drive revenue for us," he says.

In the past, "there was no monetary reward system [from SAP] that said, Here's a benefit for doing what you're doing," Torres notes. How SAP would typically reward a company like Axon would be to include Axon in new business opportunities with potential SAP customers, "inviting us in to [deals] where we might not otherwise have been called," he says.

Now with the financial incentives, Torres says the SAP-Axon relationship will only become stronger. "Sometimes nothing speaks as loudly as the reward," Torres says. "You can have a marketing campaign that talks about healthy partnering relationships, or you can write a check and prove it and remove all doubt."

SAP's Hume says while the referral program and the monetary incentives are essential to the new channel strategy, it's not the only element. The new products, which expand SAP's portfolio of software offerings and "bust the myth" of SAP as just a provider of software for giants, are just as critical.

"We now have multiple offerings in the portfolio, which is exactly what the small and midsize market needs," Hume says. "It needs choice and to go at the pace it needs to."