SAP has been pulling staff from other parts of the company and received approval for a “material increase in funding and head count” from the SAP board. It has also been taking employees from the pre-sales efforts to speed up the onboarding process. A shortage of presales and demo staff is also limiting the growth of the channel. “We have a task force working on a program to attract a lot more people into that space,” says Gilroy. Currently, SAP is letting resellers use its pre-sales personnel to address the issue. One thing SAP needs to do is take a page from the Intacct playbook. While I don’t recommend the release-a-week approach that Intacct has used in announcing resellers, SAP blew a great opportunity in either not publicizing the new VARs whose names it showed at its channel conference in February or in helping VARs issue their own releases. The D-I-Y approach to PR doesn’t work with most resellers. It sounded like Gilroy sees some improvement can be made to the publicity system.