After many discussions with SAP Business One partners across the world and with a number of folks in the SAP Channel team, it has become clear to me that we have a great opportunity to move to the next level when it comes to helping potential customers recognise the capabilities, flexibility and interoperability that SAP Business One provides.

The secret to this is being able to provide an effective state of the art demonstration environment, that you can access, anywhere, anytime and on any device – from PC to iPad, regardless of where you are in the world that helps you show existing and potential customers what can be achieved with SAP Business One 8.8.

I have been working with an environment like this for almost 18 months now and I would like to help all our SAP Business One partners achieve the same capabilities in their own organisations.

So to that end, I am launching a new project to assist our SAP Business One partners build and deploy a state of the art, high availability demo solution that brings together the best of SAP Business One, Solution Partner complementary solutions and small business IT infrastructure from Microsoft.

Over the next 2 months we will create a unique demo environment that will allow you to present a complete end to end SAP Business One demo scenario that incorporates (of course) core SAP Business One functionality, SAP Crystal Reports Server 2008, SAP Crystal Dashboard Design, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, SharePoint as well as Software Solution Partner complementary solutions, constructed on the latest Dell server technology for small enterprises.

I have just placed my order for a brand new 8 core, 2 Xeon 2.4 Ghz CPU server with 32 Gb of RAM, 6 x 1TB Hard Drives which will be configured in a RAID 10 array which will be the infrastructure that the demo environment will be built on. I’ll be utilising Microsoft’s Hyper-V 2008 R2 server virtualisation platform to build it on and we’ll be deploying both Remote Desktop Services and Citrix XenApp to access the demonstration system over the web from a variety of different devices.

I’ll be recording the entire step by step process on high definition video and by using Techsmith’s Camtasia for the detailed screen recordings and posting the process in a number of episodes both here on my blog, my YouTube channel as well as on the SAP Community Network.

Now, heres the fun part.

I am looking for a number of partners to join me and build their own demonstration environment in parallel using exactly the same process, hardware and software so that by the end of the exercise you’ll have your very own state of the art demonstration system thats available 24×7 anywhere in the world that has a Broadband Internet connection.

The benefit to you is that you’ll have hands on, step by step guidance from me to help you ensure that you can build the system and to guide you through any technical hiccups that may occur along the way.

All you need is the ability to purchase your own new Dell server, you’ll also need a Microsoft Action Pack Subscription for your Microsoft demonstration software licenses and of course access to SAP Business One demonstration software and licenses.

So if this sounds like something that can benefit you – drop me an email at richard.duffy@sap.com and we’ll talk about what you need to get things happening. I am looking forward to what will be a great project and one that based on the feedback I have received already, will help you as an SAP Channel Partner be more productive and more successful in showing the power of SAP Business One.

Richard