BackOffice Associates, a provider of information governance and data migration solutions, has been selected by SAP for a global reseller agreement through which SAP will resell two BackOffice Associates solutions as SAP-branded offerings. The two solutions are the SAP Data Services Migration Accelerator application by BackOffice Associates and the SAP Information Steward Accelerator applications by BackOffice Associates, custom edition and human capital management (HCM) edition.
SAP-BackOffice Associates Reseller Agreement is Highly Exclusive
The new agreement builds on the company’s longstanding relationship with SAP as a services partner, said Rex Ahlstrom, chief strategy officer for BackOffice Associates. The company, he said, is only the fourteenth out of SAP’s more than 5,000 partners to be selected for this type of agreement.
The BackOffice Associates solutions being resold by SAP will help customers improve their data migrations with greater control over their data and more visibility through tools such as a project management console. It is also expected that enterprises will be able to benefit from rapid data quality results that will enable business-ready data for implementations of SAP software, all through a central, secure governance model.
To achieve this partnership, said Ahlstrom, BackOffice Associates pursued an extensive qualification process with SAP called Premium Qualification, which began last year and was completed at the end of 2013.
SAP Will Resell Two BackOffice Associates Solutions
According to the companies, SAP Data Services Migration Accelerator, integrated with SAP Data Services software, will help migration teams connect, prepare and validate data prior to loading. Its project management console provides end-to-end visibility across tasks and schedules. With its built-in methodology, complex processes are expected to be easier to manage, and intuitive screens and templates will help reduce the time it takes to complete a go-live implementation.
“There are a lot of reasons that customers consolidate or migrate their data,” observed Ahlstrom. The need to migrate data can result from mergers and acquisitions, the need to move data into the cloud, the retiring of legacy applications as well as a range of other scenarios, noted Alstrom. This type of work has been very manual in the past, but the new solution provides full level of visibility into the process and also empowers the business users to be active members of the migration process, he noted.
In addition, the SAP Information Steward Accelerator, custom edition, provides data stewards and business users with a content-rich ‘passive data governance’ solution. Integrated with SAP Information Steward software, it is designed to minimize time and effort spent on investigating and eliminating data errors and to deliver trusted data in support of data quality, master data management and information governance objectives. In addition to allowing users to explore what they may have in the way of data quality errors, the solution provides secure, roles-based workflows to get the right information out to the right people to fix the data quality problems. “With the custom edition, we can deliver proactive data quality or passive data governance leveraging Information Steward, and bring to the table the knowledge, expertise, reporting and analytics libraries that we have on our platform and build them out in Information Steward.
In addition, the HCM (human capital management) edition provides the same benefits as the Information Steward custom edition with the addition of specific content and reporting designed to accelerate and optimize data quality in implementations of HCM solutions.