SAP, IBM Team Up to Tackle Midmarket

Stepping up efforts to tackle the large but fragmented midmarket, SAP has teamed with IBM to leverage its partner channel network serving small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), the companies announced Wednesday.

Under the agreement announced at the Sapphire customer event in Orlando, IBM and its channel partners will sell SAP’s All-in-One software package to SMBs in the United States. The Global Business Services arm of IBM will serve as a reseller, with the group’s channel partners eligible to earn a fee for referring opportunities to SAP and the company’s other All-in-One partner.

The channel announcement underscores SAP’s determination to tap the huge U.S. midmarket in which rivals Oracle, Microsoft and others are battling for market share.

All-in-One is a slimmed down version of mySAP Business Suite, which includes ERP, CRM and several other core SAP applications.

As part of the IBM announcement, SAP will bundle its All-in-One midmarket software with IBM’s upcoming release of its DB2 database, currently code-named Viper, according to SAP spokesman Bill Wohl.

Last week in the run-up to Sapphire, SAP designated Viper the preferred database for midsize users of its business applications.

IBM has still to announce a formal product name or shipping date for Viper, which is expected out within a few months. SAP didn’t disclose any pricing details for the All-in-One, Viper bundle.

Sapphire runs through Thursday.

-John Blau, IDG News Service

(China Martens, also of the IDG News Service, contributed to this story.)

For related news coverage, read SAP Broadens Customer Base at Sapphire and SAP Stresses Master-Data Management.

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