The latest initiatives added to the SAP Partner program aim to help partners in achieving customer success in a post-pandemic business landscape.
SAP is committed to delivering the resources needed to better equip its partners’ businesses and customers as they shift towards becoming intelligent enterprises. Last March, the German software giant unveiled plans to reduce subscription prices significantly for its demonstration and test environment licenses. Additionally, the SAP for Me portal — an online platform that partners use to boost productivity and customer engagement — has been given new information channels. New programs have also been made available to assist partners in adopting solutions and successfully managing processes using the SAP Business Technology Platform.
Once again taking steps to streamline SAP partner engagements, the tech giant has introduced its latest initiatives such as new solution test and demonstration capabilities, a go-to-market and revenue-share plan for partners, and a dashboard for tracking partner interactions with SAP and customers. These significant changes were announced during the SAP Global Partner Summit.
Moreover, SAP has established a new Partner Success organisation to enable its ecosystem and channel partners in increasing profitability and expanding their business growth. This follows SAP Chief Partner Officer Karl Fahrbach’s recent efforts to gather feedback on SAP-partner interactions through surveys and the company’s global Partner Advisory Council. Meanwhile, Fahrbach, who is also the head of Global Channels and responsible for SAP’s indirect channel worldwide, has acknowledged that SAP hasn’t always been the easiest technology company for partners to work with.
“The feedback that we got, in terms of where we can still improve, was simplicity – how do we provide a simpler way of engaging with our partners. To go from good to great when it comes to the partner experience and making our partners really successful,” he explained in an interview with CRN.
Introducing New Initiatives and Enhancing Existing Offerings in the SAP Partner Program
The latest partner initiatives come as SAP is stepping up channel sales of its Business Transformation as a Service milestone offering RISE with SAP — a collection of subscription-based software and services aimed to assist businesses and organisations with cloud migration and digital transformation projects. RISE with SAP, which was introduced in January, is anticipated to be a major topic at the SAPPHIRE NOW 2021 virtual conference.
The new SAP PartnerEdge Cloud Choice, flex model, tops the list of the new commercial offerings for partners. This revenue share and go-to-market model aims to give partners more flexibility in winning cloud customers and reward them for accelerating customer adoption. According to Fahrbach, this plan is to be offered at the beginning of the third quarter of 2021. He said:
“We’re looking at the customer and the role of the partners to make those customers successful and then we reward the partners for those activities. We want them to stay engaged and add value throughout the customer lifecycle and make our customers successful.”
SAP is also planning to launch a new Partner Finder to help partners get more customer leads. Customers will be able to use this feature to find partners who best fit their requirements. According to SAP, the Partner Finder is expected to be introduced by the third quarter of 2021 as well.
Additionally, the tech giant is also investing in training and education for SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) partner consultants and developers to help drive the development of cloud offerings, integration services, industry information, accelerators, and industry reference architectures.
Other updates include:
- Increasing the number of live demo offerings to 430 in the SAP Partner Demo Environment, shared option, and offering reduced subscription fees on certain test, demo, and development systems.
- Expanding the SAP for Me dashboard for SAP PartnerEdge Program members to include dynamic cards that help salespeople in their deals, and other new capabilities.
