A record of 2,500+ partners attended this year's SAP Global Partner Summit to hear about SAP's Next-Generation Partnering strategy, new customer experience initiatives, and how SAP will double its partner market over the next five years.
By all accounts, there are plenty of growth opportunities with SAP, and also the growth of the year's Summit itself is indicative of SAP's investments in partner success, executives said. This season, the event was moved to larger quarters, Orlando's Orange County Convention Center, which provided the room to house more content to maintain the record crowd.
The 2019 Summit featured 34 demo stations on subjects such as SAP S/4HANA Movement, SAP Partner, Edge Build Integrate, line-of-business options, the marketing journey to revenue, SAP App Center, and many more.
Additionally, there were 42 breakout sessions, not including keynote addresses, and a total of more than 650 hours of content.
"You've contributed greatly to the success of SAP. When we look at what is lying ahead of us, we can simply hit ambitious targets with a powerful partner ecosystem," explained Christian Klein, SAP COO, during a keynote interview.
Next-Gen Partnering Comes to Life
Earlier in the afternoon, Adaire Fox-Martin, Executive Board Member, Global Customer Operations, detailed Next-Generation Partnering, an initiative to help SAP partners quicken Intelligent Enterprise opportunities and deliver optimal customer experiences.
"We all want you to associate with us at which it makes the most sense, within our Intelligent Enterprise suite of applications, our Intelligent technology, our electronic platform--or across all areas," Fox-Martin explained.
She also noted a new IDC study that projects the SAP associate market (which includes all services, alternatives and partner-led innovation encircling SAP technology ) will double to over $200 billion by 2023.
"The value that we provide collectively extends beyond balance sheets. It extends to the effect we have on our combined clients, their companies and their workers," Fox-Martin said. "By having a partner-always motion, we ensure and enable consistent expansion for you, our ecosystem, and also for SAP."
Improving Customer Experience
At the day keynote, CEO Bill McDermott said SAP has invested $70 billion in research and development and acquisitions within the last ten years--all designed to change the company to have the ability to provide end-to-end solutions encompassing both operations and client experiences.
"We didn't get into hardware and also we didn't get into solutions. $70 billion was gone by us in on company software. We invested quickly and we executed super fast. Now we're entering a whole new generation and a fresh wave of invention," he explained.
In the center of that innovation is the purchase to improve customer experience options, a missing element from SAP's traditional business, McDermott said.
"Seventy-seven percent of the world's trades touch SAP systems. We could tell any customer what was going on. The problem was we did not know why it had been happening," McDermott said. "There's a $1.6 trillion economic gap since firms cannot keep customers they already have because their experiences aren't well handled. As spouses, your business now can be pointed directly at them."
The Chance about"XO" (Expertise and Operations) is almost limitless, said Arlen Shenkman, Executive Vice President, Global Business Development and Ecosystems.
"How do your business to be intelligent if you do not know what your customers and users consider you? If spouses are there first and help us solve these issues, we'll be very effective," Shenkman said. "It goes back to the thought that we need our clients to make the right decision, at the right time, with the ideal invention," Shenkman said.
Taking the Next Step
Karl Fahrbach, SAP's Chief Partner Officer, advised the Global Partner Summit audience that its time for partners to transform their companies too to guarantee long-term victory. Next-Generation Partnering requires a different mindset Fahrbach stated, a focus on clients' business requirements, not technology.
"Everything comes together in Intelligent Enterprise," Fahrbach explained. "You can concentrate on specific technology bits, but you must look at it from what's the consumer trying to fix? If you concentrate on the client process, the technologies will come together below that. If we would like to thrive in cloud collectively, consumer success is the only metric that matters."
A new Customer First organization within SAP will help ensure that SAP and partners to focus on this metric, Fahrbach said. "It's not likely to be about sales or numbers of jobs going live," he said. "This organization will look at new KPIs: adoption, renewals, customer satisfaction. The more people involve partners in the lifecycle of customers, the more value we create for clients."
Overall, clients are changing how they do business, progressively adopting cutting-edge technologies such as cloud, IoT, blockchain, machine learning, and much more, Fox-Martin explained. The IDC study confirms that tendency:
- At least 55% of organizations will probably be"digitally based on 2020, eying the future together with new business models and digitally enabled products and solutions
- Cloud, analytics and societal will rise to $764 billion by 2022, a 14.2% compounded annual growth rate
- Innovation accelerators such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and IoT will grow to $1.8 trillion by 2022, a 17.5% CAGR.
To spur spouses to develop their own innovation and intellectual property, SAP declared free SAP S/4HANA Cloud along with SAP C/4HANA testing environments to partners for the next 12 months and has extended the completely free entry to SAP Cloud Platform announced at last year's International Partner Summit.
Gavin Quinn, CEO, and co-founder of Mindset Consulting, a Minneapolis-based SAP partner, said his company has adopted Intelligent Enterprise along with the customer experience concept because it makes people's lives improved, which has helped grow his business.
"We are moving people from monotonous job to empowering work," Quinn stated
"The Intelligent Enterprise suite and other new software SAP are putting out can have a fantastic impact on productivity, automation, and customer experience overall. I've been through over 100 SAP implementations in my lifetime. They're never successful because of software. They're successful because of the people here. I'm excited to see more about Intelligent Enterprise and that which comes next."
Reference: Scott Campbell’s blog on Sap.