Mentioned in this article Games: Dota 2 Teams: Team Liquid

German-based software corporation SAP enters the esports industry with a three-year sponsorship deal with Team Liquid .

As an innovation partner, SAP will develop software for Team Liquid based on in-game data, to help the organization’s players analyze performance.

SAP has spent six months evaluating partnership opportunities, and will work initially with TL’s Dota 2 team. team.

SAP has formed similar partnerships within traditional sports, including soccer, tennis, and sailing.

SAP has announced its entry into the esports industry through a sponsorship agreement with Team Liquid. The multinational company, which develops enterprise application software, will work with the esports organization to develop software based on game-derived data, helping the team to analyze player performance and scout new talent.

[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]SAP will work with Team Liquid to develop software to help the team organization to analyze player performance and scout new talent.[/perfectpullquote]

Speaking to The Esports Observer, Milan Cerny, technology and innovation lead for SAP global sponsorships, says that the SAP Hana platform will be at the core of these new esports solutions. According to the announcement, use of the company’s cloud platform, as well as IoT, predictive and machine learning functionalities are being evaluated at the moment.

“I think that’s going to give us huge opportunities to analyze this entirely digital sport, and bring in some value for the players and teams,” says Cerny. “Also for the analysts—we understand it’s a really intense job to understand the complexity of those titles, and this is where we come into play with our knowledge and technology to make it easier to understand.”

SAP first began examining the esports space over a year ago. The company had been evaluating opportunities in the industry within the last six months, before deciding to partner with Team Liquid. Cerny says that the company will initially co-develop software for the organization’s The International 7 winning Dota 2 team, and has several developers working exclusively on the collaboration.

“It’s not just about placing our logo somewhere, or just promoting a particular product,” he says. “It’s really sitting together and coming up with ideas on how we can improve the performance that Team Liquid are bringing forward. They’ve been hugely successful in Dota 2 already, but maintaining a performance level is sometimes even harder than reaching it.”

Related Article: Interview with Victor Goossens, Co-Owner of Team Liquid

“We want to work with them very closely, work with the players, coaching staff, analysts, but also with people like Victor Goossens and Steve Arhancet, doing the administrative side on Team Liquid. What we want to have is a holistic approach, to the entire organization.”

[perfectpullquote align=”left” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]For the 2017 fiscal year, SAP reported over $23B in revenue.[/perfectpullquote]

The deal between SAP and Team Liquid was facilitated by Lagardère Sports, a longtime partner of SAP—who will now be working with the company as its esports lead agency—and Build a Rocket, a Cologne-based consulting esports agency that focuses exclusively on esports. Marc Drenkhahn, executive director team sports at Lagardère Sports, says that as a global tech-company, SAP has a high brand fit to the esports ecosystem.

“We are sure that, in the short term, people would not consider SAP as non-endemic,” he says. “We have recognized a growing demand of data and analytics software within the esports ecosystem for performance-based coaching, reasonable statistics for fans, as well as scouting and talent management. SAP can deliver that!”

SAP is one of the largest independent software companies in the world, with over 378K customers in more than 180 countries, and currently employs over 88K staff. For the 2017 fiscal year, the company reported over $23B in revenue. The company has also been providing technology solutions for the traditional sports industry over the last twenty years, with some of its most notable partners including the German Soccer Association (DFB), the World Tennis Association (WTA) and the Extreme Sailing Series.

According to Cerny, SAP’s overarching mission when it comes to esports engagement is to reach an entirely new audience: