SAP Solutions Now Available on Alibaba Cloud Marketplace
Meeting Our Customers Where They Do Business
Have you ever seen a lemonade stand indoors, on a cold and rainy day? Of course not — because even young children trying to make a few dollars realize that you need to sell to your customers where they are, and when they have a need for your product. For lemonade-stand entrepreneurs, that means selling cold beverages on a highly foot-trafficked, sunny sidewalk when the temperature’s nearing triple-digits. And as the business market continues to shift digitally, for SAP, it means continuing to expand our commerce footprint, identifying new places and platforms to connect with customers.
At SAP, we care a lot about customer journeys and improving the customer experience. An integral part of that is being where our customers are — and where they expect us to be, too. Today, that increasingly means we’re selling our solutions online — giving our customers and prospects digital access to discover, try and buy our solutions across SAP.com, and the industry’s top digital marketplaces. With an online marketplace that is growing every day, Alibaba Cloud Marketplace is the next strategic channel to sell SAP solutions — making it accessible to the buyers that are visiting their platform monthly. Alibaba Cloud is ranked as China’s largest public cloud service provider and the third largest worldwide.
The B2B market today is increasingly competitive, and it’s critical that our customers can find us wherever they do business — which is why we’re not limiting ourselves to selling only through direct channels. Customers can continue to visit SAP.com/china to find and complete the purchases of SAP and partner solutions — but they can now also visit Alibaba Cloud Marketplace. The path to purchase for customers must be simple, seamless and intuitive. By selling through Alibaba, we’re giving our customers an opportunity to shop for the SAP solutions and applications needed to solve their business challenges, without ever leaving the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace — a place they trust to do their business transactions. Simply find, try and check out directly through Alibaba.
To start, SAP Crystal Reports and SAP Crystal Reports viewer are now available via Alibaba, creating new opportunities for small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) to quickly and easily access the power of business intelligence. Key benefits of working with SAP Crystal solutions include:
• Leveraging powerful reporting tools to deliver key insights and a clear picture of the business to decision makers
• Getting broad connectivity to diverse data sources to create real-time operational reports
• Making actionable information available online or offline — from applications, portals, and mobile devices
• Using flexible, customizable report design to give customers and partners the reporting formats of their choice.
Kicking off with SAP Crystal Reports, SAP will grow its presence on Alibaba Cloud Marketplace, with plans to add more solutions in the future, continuing to expand the channels where buyers can interact with and purchase SAP solutions.
As businesses become more global and customers look beyond brand websites to compare, try and buy solutions, accessibility through multiple channels is critical to sales and marketing strategies. Alibaba Cloud Marketplace is where buyers turn to find business solutions every year. By allowing customers to digitally buy the solutions they need for the job at hand, at the sites they visit regularly and trust, customers can purchase decisions confidently on their timeline — no matter when or where that might be. The only question that remains as to why we’re selling on Alibaba Cloud Marketplace is — how could we not?
This story originally appeared on the SAP News Center.
