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Masney: We’re doing a series based on some of the benchmarking studies that have been done -- such as in the area of human capital management -- to help people. With these benchmarks, a company can take and measure themselves against the best-in-class.
A second thing we’re doing is building a community around consulting -- almost like an Amazon.com, where people come in and rate a book. Here, clients of consultants can come in and rate the performance of consultants they’ve used.
The idea is to better match member needs with consulting resource talent.
And we want to increase the quality of programs like that.
CIOZone: And how has membership been? Has membership increased over the last year?
Masney: We were up by about 10,000 members.
CIOZone: What contributed to such a big increase?
Masney: I think our programs. People are seeing value in our programs. And we had tremendous retention of our membership year over year.
And SAP keeps selling software to new companies.
Their strategy to extend into the small to medium enterprise (SME) space -- there's a huge thrust – and that's where you have volume and velocity.
CIOZone: I recently heard that something like 78% of SAP's customers are now coming from the SME space.
Masney: I'm not a 100% sure of that number, but there's an immense amount of focus on the mid-market and that is the growth engine for SAP into the future. And that's the reason they're making significant investments in their All-In-One business management software for small and midsize companies, which was a good product anyway.
They also have made significant strategic investments in their Business by Design hosted software service.
And they continue to invest in the Business One applications suite for small and midsize companies.
They're investing across the entire portfolio, of course. but there are only so many hundred billion dollar companies in the world.
So they made, what I think from a personal perspective, is a wise strategic decision to broaden their portfolio and play across the entire pyramid of opportunities.
CIOZone: And what about ASUG. What software do you run on?
That’s another thing that's really exciting. We are also now an SAP company. We own Business by Design, which is so far going well. We're working very closely with SAP on that.
CIOZone: What's the most pressing issue right now for ASUG members?
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