Scott McMahon is the founder and president of
Apollo Consulting, a California-based SAP Business One value-added reseller. Scott maintains that on his very first iBOLT implementation-the streamlining of an e-Commerce site (for which Magic offers its SAP Business One partners a template) - he was able to decrease project implementation time to one-fifth and cost to one-tenth of what the project would have experienced without iBOLT.
Partner Link Newsletter: Will you tell us a little bit about your company? What services do you provide, and who are your customers? Scott McMahon: I am partner and founder of Apollo Consulting. About 18 months ago, we moved into the SAP Business One space, and that's now our entire business focus: We are a one-stop-shop for SAP Business One and some companion products and work in our regional area in California. We have a total of 27 employees with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami, as well as a development office in Argentina. We do everything from selling the product to developing and implementing systems around it and providing training and support.
PLN: How are your revenues split between SAP sales, implementation, and services? SM: Our revenues breakdown is approximately 30 percent sales, 50 percent consulting, 10 percent development and 10 percent support. About 20 percent of that total comes from our existing customer base, and about 80 percent is new customers.
PLN: Why have you chosen to focus on the SAP Business One market? SM: Because it's a very fast-growing and lucrative market. There's a lot of activity and SAP is a great brand.
PLN: Can you generalize about the types of projects that you implement for SAP Business One users?
SM: A lot of customers implement using a phased approach, so we might go back in later to do an EDI project. There will always be additional things that they want to do with the system or there will be new requirements that come up.
PLN: When, why, and how did you form a relationship with Magic Software? SM: We had a client, Betty Mills, in 2005 that needed integration to SAP Business One. They already had a heavy investment in their storefront and it was working fine for them and they were concerned that a turnkey ecommerce solution was going to look too "cookie cutter." So we realized that they would be better off with Middleware. I was already aware of Magic through trade shows and marketing, so we contacted them to set up a visit, and decided to use iBOLT as the best solution for the customer. It was quite an interesting implementation.
PLN: What does Magic allow you to offer customers that you wouldn't be able to bring to the table without iBOLT Special Edition for SAP Business One? SM: iBOLT gives us a really fast integration tool. We could do integration for clients with the SAP SDK [Software Development Kit] as another option, but that's a very costly way for customers to go. Magic has already developed the APIs so the process is very easy to replicate and implement quickly. The savings go directly to the customer. To do what we did at Betty Mills would have taken easily five times as long and been ten times more expensive without iBOLT.
PLN: To what extent are customers aware that Magic Software’s iBOLT product is part of their solution? Is it transparent to them, or are they aware that iBOLT is being used?
SM: Some companies are aware of iBOLT and some are not. It depends on the customer and the situation. If it is a back-to-back processing application that is running behind the scenes -- the customer might not even know it's there. They might see it on the price list or on the price quote at the start, but they tend not to question it. On the other hand, for critical applications like a storefront integration or EDI or those kinds of things, iBOLT would be very clear to them. We would demo it separately and talk about it separately, and we would probably have them talk to an iBOLT customer. It would be very prominently discussed from the beginning.
PLN: What has been your experience with training? How difficult is it to train your staff to work with iBOLT? SM: The length of time required for training depends, of course, on the person's skill set. For someone with a good integration background, it's pretty easy. I would say it's a pretty standard learning curve. We do send people to Magic's classes and we've also sometimes used Magic's staff on our projects so our people who work side-by-side with them learn a lot about the product that way too.
PLN: Recently, Magic has been publishing this newsletter and publishing documents like the Use Case Catalog and other things that some business partners are doing to help all the business partners. Are these documents useful to you and do you think they will be useful to other SAP business partners? And what else could Magic be doing to help? SM: The Use Case Catalog and the newsletter are very helpful to those of us in the SAP community, especially newcomers who haven't got a lot of experience or who haven't been exposed to the power of iBOLT. These tools really help them to understand how much they can do with it. As far as what else you could do, I'd like to see Magic create a pre-configured demo environment that people can have access to and log on and have a virtual working environment, and a box that's available so partners can get on and demonstrate a real working SAP environment and touch and feel the transactions with some of the pre-defined scenarios/templates that Magic has already built loaded up and live on the system. We could play with it internally but we could also take it out to the customer. We could keep adding to the list of templates available. The more and more people see how it could be used, the more there is to sell.
PLN: Will the SAP business partners be willing to add to that list of applications and templates and share them with other business partners? Wouldn't they see that as giving away trade secrets to the competition? SN: This is a very friendly marketplace, and we all share and get along. It's not like Microsoft! There are 28 partners here on the West Coast and we are always talking and helping each other out. People would definitely be willing to help each other out by sharing tips and tricks. This is a new and evolving market, and we are all learning. We're all in it together, and there's plenty of business to go around.