BPM vendor wants to drive half its revenue through partners

Orlando – IDS Scheer would like to drive half its revenue in the Americas through the channel, and the Business Process Modeling (BPM) vendor has three objectives in building-out its partner program to meet that goal.

IDS Scheer produces the ARIS platform of BPM tools. It’s used by consultants and partners to ease and lessen the risk of BI implementations and upgrades. The German parent company, IDS Scheer AG, is it a different stage of maturity with its partner program than IDS Scheer is in the Americas says Allen Johnson, director, Americas partners, IDS Scheer.

As he focuses on building-out the program in the Americas, Johnson says he has set three primary objectives to build from.

The first is to increase off payroll revenue by selling licenses they wouldn’t have sold otherwise, primarily through the channel. Currently about 30 per cent of IDS Scheer’s Americas revenue comes through SIs, not including the SAP business, and Johnson says the goal is to build that to more than 50 per cent.

The second channel goal is to augment IDS Scheer’s own delivery capability, providing partners the support they need to do product implementation. Some partners want help with ARIS customer training, for example, while others want to do it themselves.

“If we’re going to scale our business to a certain level we’re not going to be able to grow that out organically,” said Johnson.

The third goal, which Johnson says is the key one, is to drive strategic continuous usage of ARIS in the enterprise, so the product doesn’t go on the shelf after the initial BI implementation. This would also equal more license revenue. And continuous BPM will mean dashboards to measure business processes vs. key performance indicators for operational executives, something Johnson says IDS Scheer can’t do itself.

“We can’t build those platforms for a company, those role based views and customized dashboards, it’s the (partner) that has those dialogs with the clients,” said Johnson.

The vendor hasn’t been active on the reseller front in the Americas, says Johnson, focusing instead on SIs, although in Europe IDS Scheer does have a tiered partner program and a network of regional resellers. While there’s no time tine for bringing the reseller program here, says Johnson, that doesn’t mean the door is closed.

“The resellers I’d be interested in talking to today would be the resellers that are BMC (NYSE:BMC), SAP (NYSE:SAP), and Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) SMB-focused because we’re a logical extension to their business,” said Johnson. “Any of the resellers that are BMC, Oracle or SAP I would talk to them today and extend what we’re doing in Europe today.”

Johnson adds he has a number of value and volume-based programs available to extend attractive margins to these resellers.

And Johnson says there is a market for SIs and resellers to use ARIS in BI implementations. GK Foods, a Jamaican food services company and a division of GraceKennedy, used ARIS when it rolled-out SAP across the global company, which included five manufacturing facilities and right major distribution centres.

Zak Mars, divisional business systems manager with GK Foods, says the company decided to consolidate its 50 disparate legacy systems (thanks to acquisitions) on SAP in 2005 because it wanted real-time visibility into information at the divisional level. Also important was reducing redundancy of effort and integrating manufacturing and distribution operations to improve demand planning order fulfillment rates while reducing inventory levels.

The 12-compamy roll-out also had to be accomplished in 18 months, says Mars, because the management didn’t want to tie-up fiscal and human resources for any longer. To meet the deadline, Mars says GK Foods turned to an industry-specific implementation of SAP through ARIS, so it wasn’t necessary to heavily tweak and customize the implementation for their business.

“One of the key reasons we chose IDS Scheer was because they had a tool to help us meet that goal,” said Mars. “ARIS SmartPath gave us tremendous advantage to get a head start. I believe if we were starting without a head start this could not have been achieved in such a short time frame.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Jeff Jedras
Jeff Jedras
A veteran technology and business journalist, Jeff Jedras began his career in technology journalism in the late 1990s, covering the booming (and later busting) Ottawa technology sector for Silicon Valley North and the Ottawa Business Journal, as well as everything from municipal politics to real estate. He later covered the technology scene in Vancouver before joining IT World Canada in Toronto in 2005, covering enterprise IT for ComputerWorld Canada. He would go on to cover the channel as an assistant editor with CDN. His writing has appeared in the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen and a wide range of industry trade publications.

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