01 Mar SAP Doubles Down on Its Commitment to Partners in 2023

With more organizations turning to the cloud to overcome increasingly complex business challenges, we know we can’t stand still. SAP partners continue to take center stage in SAP’s move to the cloud.

How do we best support our partners to deliver customer success while growing and scaling their businesses? With a dedicated partner-centric strategy that considers the full range of diverse business models and incentivizes partners to pursue the activities that will yield the biggest impact.

Our strategy is built around three key initiatives that help partners expand market reach, empower innovation, and enable customer transformation:

Expand Market Reach
One of SAP’s priorities is to help partners succeed at winning cloud customers. However, effective market expansion involves more than converting installed base customers and winning net-new names. It also requires retaining them and driving higher customer lifetime value (CLTV) through recurring revenue.

The recurring revenue model has several benefits for SAP partners. It helps them build a predictable revenue stream that provides stability to their businesses. A 2020 report from Deloitte states that companies operating on the recurring revenue model are better positioned for accurate forecasting, even when disruptions occur to the economy, supply chain, and customer behaviors, as they did early in the decade.

The focus on recurring revenue also allows partners to create regular touchpoints in relationships with customers to ensure their satisfaction with their solutions and discover opportunities to provide additional SAP products and partner solutions.

To help our partners expand their market reach and create these opportunities, we will boost partner autonomy, allowing partners to drive business more independently, with support from SAP. We’ve had great success with cloud-relevant models such as CCFlex. In the coming year, we’ll look to scale these models to give partners the flexibility they need. Finally, we’ll work with partners to grow our S/4HANA Public Cloud customer base, with RISE with SAP as the proven catalyst for the shift from on-prem to the cloud.

Empower Innovation
Collaboration between SAP and partners is a win-win for customers. Partners understand businesses’ day-to-day challenges in particular industries and the unique processes that vary from organization to organization. Their insights can create true customer-first solutions by seamlessly integrating SAP solutions with partner intellectual property (IP).

Partners can create new solutions that differentiate their businesses, deliver higher margins, and create new recurring revenue streams. In research commissioned by SAP, IDC found that partners who invest more than 20% of revenue in IP can expect 60% higher revenue growth than average. The research also revealed that public cloud services are among the greatest growth opportunities for partners.

Empowering partner innovation is a key priority for SAP, and we are committed to helping partners innovate successfully with SAP and commercialize their innovations. We’ll do that by making targeted portfolio decisions around areas that SAP should build organically, and areas where partner expertise is a key enabler for our joint customers. We’ll also make it easier for partners to innovate on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). And we’ll grow our Endorsed Apps’ commercial model for global strategic cloud partnerships in order to offer customers a more compelling value proposition.

These initiatives will result in increased portfolio relevance for customers and, ultimately, increased revenue and profitability for partners.

Enabling Customer Transformation
Gartner reports that worldwide public cloud spending is forecast to grow more than 20% from 2022 to 2023 to reach $591.8 billion. Gartner points to economic uncertainty as a driver as the cloud gives businesses agility and scalability while still providing a platform for innovation.

The final pillar of our partner strategy aligns with these findings by focusing on providing customers with a measurable value from their cloud investments. SAP is equipping partners to provide solutions that enable business transformation and clear ROI.

Moreover, in highly competitive and rapidly changing solution areas, customer needs will evolve. SAP partners can find sustainable opportunities for growth when they build lasting relationships with these customers and help them adapt their IT environments to meet their needs over time, increasing customer lifetime value.

To action this, we will support our partners to shift the installed base and new customers to RISE with SAP, which allows them to focus on business transformation and quick, measurable wins. SAP BTP is our platform for partners to create customized applications and extensions and generate faster time-to-value. We will lower barriers to SAP BTP adoption, enabling IP development and cross-product integration to drive business transformation. And finally, a topic that is top-of-mind for all partners, is capacity. We will support partners to grow the number of certified consultants through programs like SAP University Alliances to future-proof their business.

Staying Ahead of the Curve
Customer needs are changing. They see the value in transitioning from on-premise to the cloud. They want the agility to respond to market and consumer demands, and they expect the solutions SAP partners provide to deliver long-term value. SAP’s 2023 strategy will help ensure that SAP partners have the tools they need to succeed in this new environment – from commercial incentives to certification, marketing, and technical support. Now is the time to maximize the resources and benefits available to our SAP partners and deliver lasting customer value.