Last week's issue focused on reports of channel recruitment by several companies, including SAP. And events of the last two weeks support the idea that SAP is ramping up activity as it has hired a North American channel VP while SugarCRM, an open source vendor, picked up an SAP vet for its channel development.
To recap: Many mid-market resellers know about Infor's hiring of Taylor Macdonald to build a channel late in 2009. Australian Pronto hired a channel VP last fall and a week Epicor ago put Microsoft alum Sam Montana in charge of its channel program. On Tuesday, Syspro posted on its Web site a press release entitled, "Resellers Can Still Profit Despite Market Dynamics, Vendor Consolidations, Other Upheavals." It offers a Syspro white paper on selecting the right ERP software vendor. It's not clear if the company has increased its recruiting activity in any formal way or is simply taking advantage of the recruiting noise. We get to talk in a few days since schedules didn't permit an interview about Syspro's efforts this week.