Over the last two years, in particular in APJ we have conducted numerous onsite workshops to enable our VARs on SAP Enterprise Support and SAP Solution Manager topics. I have summarized these activities in a previous blog post named VARvelous SAP Support Partner Workshops in APJ. For 2014, we will now apply some of the APJ best practices and lessons learned to other countries worldwide.
Last week we run our first pilot VAR workshop in Warsaw, Poland. 27 people from our Polish VAR partners attended the training which is an excellent ratio. The feedback from the attending partners was very positive, underlined by an overall high event satisfaction rate.
This pilot now also helps to tweak the agenda and contents of further VAR workshops in other countries. Furthermore, each country has its own partner landscape that may have different requirements which needs to be considered.
With regards to the Poland workshop we had opted for a mixed approach: Day one was rather focused on the partners’ sales people whereas day two was mainly focused on the technical support engineers. On the first day we mainly spoke about the value of SAP Enterprise Support and SAP Solution Manager – from an VAR and an end customer perspective.
Day two was packed with technical information about SAP Solution Manager and also included lots of demos and hands-on exercises in our live demo system. Btw you can access this cloud based demo system here - it's free!
I’m already in touch with all the regions SAP internally to analyze if and where to conduct similar workshops. Please feel free to comment if you are interested in further details. In addition to onsite trainings we are also planning to do several remote webinar trainings on SAP Enterprise Support and SAP Solution Manager. Stay tuned for that and make sure to track the Partner Enablement Center for these upcoming sessions.