UPDATE: new accelerators for implementing partner portals for SAP Cloud for Customer available. Learn more at Partner Channel Management – THE way to engage your partners

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In today’s accelerating and increasingly networked economy, it is crucial for companies to quickly innovate and sell their solutions on the market. You can try to do this alone – but you can certainly multiply your return on investments with the help of trusted alliances. Enterprises of all sizes can strongly benefit from a lively partner ecosystem to drive additional revenue and increase profit.

Do you successfully leverage an active network of partners to promote and sell your products?

Imagine you are a channel manager and responsible for growing a partner network and coordinating go-to-market activities – probably not an easy task. And successfully doing business with your company might not be easy for some of your partners as well: from initial partner registration to closing the first deal. Thus it is important as a channel manager to ensure a smooth partner onboarding & enablement and provide transparency about ongoing customer opportunities and deals.

Give partners all the information they need

The easier it is to do business with your company the more partners will join your partner network. The goal is to help channel managers to efficiently engage with partners and enable their experts:

• Provide a harmonized, central partner experience
• Provide easy, role-based access to high-value content, key information and intuitive self-services
• Empower partners to efficiently and self-sufficiently support go-to-market campaigns and drive indirect revenue

Intuitive self-service portal for your partners

With the new partner portal for SAP Cloud for Customer, your can take the partner experience to a new level – leveraging the cloud for driving channel innovations and flexibility. The solution is powered by SAP HANA Cloud portal and allows you to easily offer an attractive self-service portal to your partners.

Picture: central access to partner services via partner portal

As a channel manager you can securely expose relevant information and services from SAP Cloud for Customer to authorized partners via the partner-facing website. The solution provides various out of the box services and content that enables you to quickly build and run a partner portal. This includes a public registration site and the restricted partner site for launching the self-service applications which connect to your SAP Cloud for Customer (Sales) tenant.

Partner Services:

• Self-registration for new partners
• Access partnership data such as their company data, assigned solutions (sell & support), partner programs & types and funds.
• View and create leads & opportunities
• Create and edit customer activities & appointments
• Register new deals

Picture: creating and editing a new lead via the partner portal

The site can be branded to reflect your company’s corporate design (e.g. logos and colors).

Integration with SAP Cloud for Customer

The partner portal is based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform and leverages various platform services such as portal /launchpad, identity and user management, connectivity and roles, security as well as SAP Web IDE / SAPUI5 for custom development and extensions.

Customers can create their own partner sites or start with the provided apps delivered via the out of the box integration with SAP Cloud for Customer (Sales). SAP Cloud for Customer serves as the central system of record for the relevant business objects (partners, leads, opportunities, etc.) and the configuration of their meta data.The partner portal solution provides pre-configured web applications that visualize the data from SAP Cloud for Customer exposed via oData services.

You may also create custom business objects and oData services to extend the SAP Cloud for Customer solution. Based on these services you may then develop own custom web apps with the development tool of SAP HANA Cloud platform and add them to the partner portal.

Your sales and channel managers usually connect directly to SAP Cloud for Customer to access to full services of the Partner Channel Management solution (including ability to see and update cross-partner business content and configurations according to their role and assigned permissions).

Note: The partner portal primarily focuses on integration with sales-related objects of SAP Cloud for Customer. If you are interested in services & support scenarios, check the Support Site Edition, which allows to create and track service tickets via the portal.

Further Information

If you are interests in further details about the solution, feel free to check the following documents:

• SAP Cloud for Customer – User Guide https://help.sap.com/cloud4customer
• SAP Cloud for Customer – Administrator Guide https://help.sap.com/cloud4customer
• Integration Guide http://service.sap.com/cloud4customer > Cloud Portal Provisioning Guide

Looking forward to your feedback,

Thomas