How SAP Business One Solution Providers Benefit from Building an AWS Practice

SAP has been a member of the Amazon Partner Network (APN) since 2011 and since then, we have worked together to certify multiple SAP Solutions on AWS, including a number of configurations of Business One, and most recently SAP Business One on HANA to run on the AWS Cloud. Small and medium enterprises can now access all of the benefits of SAP Business One while leveraging the increased agility, cost savings, security and reliability that the AWS Cloud provides.
When SAP customers of all types move to AWS they almost always enjoy a lower TCO, increased agility and flexibility, and the advantages of moving to an OPEX model, which makes it a very attractive option. AWS has a very robust APN partner ecosystem with thousands of Consulting and Technology partners to support our customers globally. APN Partners are seeing that they can better serve their customers when they build a cloud practice around AWS and offer cloud solutions to their customers.
Provide Customers Solutions, The Way They want to Consume Them
If you look at the B2B software market as a whole, customers are interested in hearing about ways they can trade what usually is a large upfront CapEx expense into a lower monthly predictable recurring payment for software solutions that includes infrastructure consumption. The explosion of SaaS (software-as-service) in the market is evidence of this; the model is becoming the new standard for the way customers want to buy. When SAP Business One VARs (value-added-resellers) work with AWS to build a cloud practice they have the ability to offer their customers that exact same experience. It gives them the ability to provide their customers the SAP Business One solution they want on the terms they expect in this new cloud-based economy.
New Stable and Predictable Revenue Stream
Many software VARs operate off of a larger, transactional CapEx heavy license sales model that is measured on a quarterly basis. The revenue that they collect comes in large chunks in the quarter that they complete the sales process and obtain a payment from a customer (typically a PO). They then go through process of implementing and customizing the software over the coming months. While this does provide an influx in cash, this model is difficult to predict with a degree of certainty and typically puts companies into revenue peaks and valleys annually. These revenue peaks and valleys have an effect on gross profit, which affect marketing and other selling expenses, and can ultimately result in a potential decrease in your net income. VARs who build a fully managed SAP Business One offering on AWS introduce a new, predictable recurring revenue stream to their business that over time begins to smooth out these peaks and valleys. As they grow this business and earn back the initial customer acquisition costs they gain an increased level of predictability and more stable cash flows. The services they offer and business model they operate in today will ultimately dictate how they will shift their expenses to accommodate for this new revenue stream.

Reduce Time Consuming Steps in Your Customer Acquisition Cycle
Most of the time, SAP Business One VARs have to add multiple steps in their customer acquisition cycle around infrastructure in order to deliver a solution. They will generally have to provide a customer with the needed infrastructure requirements and allow the customer to procure new, or sometimes re-provision existing infrastructure on their own. This often requires a customer to start a second procurement track to obtain the infrastructure they need to deploy the solution they want to run. This can add weeks or months to the time it takes to deliver a solution to a customer. Regardless of the model, with AWS, you have instant access to the infrastructure you need to deploy SAP Business One globally. This allows SAP Business One VARs to provide customers more transparency around the total cost of the solution, the time it takes to deploy, and ultimately reduces the time it takes for the VAR to provide the SAP Business One solution to the customer. This allows the customer to gain access to the SAP Business One system faster and eliminate additional buying cycles.
Increase Your Agility and Provide your Customers Solutions Faster
AWS has a number of different tools that we provide our customers and APN partners to automate the provisioning of the underlying resources needed to support different applications. The power of this technology allows customers and APN partners to reduce the deployment process on AWS down to minutes and a few mouse clicks. AWS CloudFormation allows you to quickly and easily build, and deploy a template that includes a collection of AWS resources (called a stack) to support SAP Business One, or any application that can run on AWS. You have the ability to take these templates and deploy them in any of the 30 Availability Zones offered globally by AWS in a matter of minutes. This allows you to automate the infrastructure provisioning, reduce or even eliminate potential mistakes, and dramatically reduce the deployment time for a customer for SAP Business One.

Want to learn more about building an AWS Cloud practice around SAP Business One? We are here to help, contact us here.
Want to learn more about the AWS Partner Network (APN)? Click here to learn about the APN Consulting Partner program and all the benefits it provides.
Want to try Business One on Hana yourself? Click here to download our SAP Business One on HANA Quick Start. This will allow you to automatically provision an SAP Business One on HANA environment in under 90 minutes!