FEAT

URE

STO

RY Ecosystem and Channels

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When SAP was just a small startup in 1972, its

five employees spent the majority of their time

at customers’ data centers and tackled develop-

ment work back in the office mostly at night

and during weekends. To realize their vision of

standard application software for real-time data

processing, the founders knew success would

come from taking the perspective of a customer

looking in, rather than from the inside of the

company looking out. This philosophy served

as SAP’s foundation then, and despite dramatic

industry-wide changes over the past four decades,

user experience and customer needs and results

remain paramount. That’s not changing.

This customer-centric approach is reflected

in today’s SAP partner ecosystem. Our partners

have thrived by building their businesses around

similar customer-centric core values. They

have embarked on extraordinary co-innovation

projects inspired by their customers and their

own experiences with SAP technology, and often

become users of the SAP-based solutions they

create for their customers. Importantly, some

SAP partners were SAP customers before the

idea of becoming a partner, and offering and sup-

porting SAP products, ever crossed their minds.

A Longtime Hosting Services PartnershipFreudenberg IT (FIT) is one of the earliest

examples of an SAP partner that initially began

as an SAP customer. Its customer-to-partner

evolution began long before the onset of the

current knowledge-based revolution, which

encompasses mobile, bring your own device

(BYOD), cloud, big data, analytics, social

The Customer-to-Partner EvolutionMake the Switch from SAP Customer to SAP Partner to Transform Your Business

by Kevin Ichhpurani, SAP

networking, apps proliferation, and other devel-

opments, and has accelerated both SAP and

partner growth.

Headquartered in Weinheim, Germany, FIT

operates as part of the Freudenberg Group

of companies, a family-owned conglomerate

with more than US$8 billion in annual sales.

Freudenberg was among SAP’s first users in the

1970s — customer number seven to be exact.

In this capacity, the company assisted in the

initial development of SAP software, so much

so that the FIT brand emerged as a spin-off in

1995 to ultimately deliver SAP hosting services

throughout Europe, North America, and Asia.

“Our SAP partner business clearly began with

our customer relationship — a great beginning

as our parent company gained both user and

contributor insights during those startup years,”

says Kevin Diaz, FIT’s Senior Vice President of

North America, where the company is rapidly

expanding its SAP service offerings. “Today, we’re

making all SAP applications available to our own

customers in a multitude of hosted scenarios

across multiple data centers worldwide. The SAP

portfolio is now so much deeper and broader in

scope that it’s creating unprecedented paths for

partnership and business growth.”

Take the Next Step: Partner Program OfferingsFIT’s partnership to provide SAP hosting services

to its customers is just one example of the many

ways SAP customers can take the next step to

transform into strategic partners. Our partner

programs offer multiple avenues to successfully

make this transition.

Kevin Ichhpurani (kevin. ichhpurani@sap.com) is Senior Vice President of Strategic Ecosystem and Business Development at SAP. He is responsible for managing the Global Strategic Partners and driving business development for the Mobility, Cloud, and Database & Technology market categories. Previ-ously, Kevin was Senior Vice President of Corporate Busi-ness Development at SAP, leading the development of all strategic partnerships and the SAP NetWeaver equity fund. Before joining SAP, Kevin spent 15 years in the technology sector in various executive roles. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

This article appeared in the Oct n Nov n Dec 2013 issue of SAPinsider (www.SAPinsiderOnline.com) and appears here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing.

Subscribe today. Visit SAPinsiderOnline.com.

Accelerating the Pace of OEM Development in All Directions and Regions SAP’s original equipment manufacturer (OEM)

partner program allows partners to embed SAP

solutions and platforms into their own applica-

tions to build more robust, reliable products

at a lower cost. These OEM partners, many of

whom first acquired their SAP skills as users, can

capitalize on a broad range of program benefits

to further their SAP business, including:

■ Access to SAP applications, analytics, database

and technology, and mobile, cloud, and

in-memory solutions

■ Flexible licensing, deployment options,

and royalty models that fit unique business

requirements

■ Fast time-to-market with integration

validation, not-for-resale demos and

licenses, and implementation programs

■ Co-innovation and co-development in partner-

ship with SAP’s product management team

■ Special invitations to beta testing, SAP Ramp-

Up programs, and future roadmap insights

UK-based McLaren Group is an example of an

SAP customer that shifted gears toward an OEM

partnership. The company has been using SAP

HANA to accelerate data aggregation and analysis

for myriad Formula One car components. Better

race-day decisions set the pace at first. Now, the

company is considering the potential of an OEM

partnership with SAP to support business diver-

sification related to performance management

systems, including telemetry, modeling, and real-

time simulation capabilities. These capabilities

can be applied to a wide range of areas, such as

sports, health and wellness, energy, and automo-

tive. For example, programs may be as diverse as

monitoring patients’ health remotely to real-time

analytics, or simulating complex engineering

processes in the oil and gas sector. As an OEM

partner, McLaren would use SAP innovations to

augment the competitive advantage it provides

across these areas.

Within the last few years, OEM partner-

ship types at SAP have become more and more

diverse. Although hardware companies are usu-

ally associated as OEMs, many more independent

software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators

(SIs) are joining SAP’s OEM partner program

alongside other unique device partners. What’s

truly original in this formula is that the end result

and deliverables of these partnerships are driving

growth across all market segments and regions.

While SAP HANA can be viewed as a rising

tide that is lifting all types of partnerships, it is

not the only reason why OEM partners are thriv-

ing. More partners are adopting our mobility

platform, driven by SAP Afaria and SAP Mobile

Platform. Others are choosing SAP Sybase SQL

Anywhere, SAP Sybase Adaptive Server Enter-

prise (SAP Sybase ASE), and SAP Sybase IQ to

enhance their business. OEM partners are inno-

vating in their own markets by embedding SAP

technology into their products to deliver more

end-user benefits.

Managed Cloud as a Service: Simplicity and Successes in the CloudSAP’s managed cloud as a service program, for-

merly called “ITO” (for IT Outsourcing), takes an

SAP partner’s private cloud and application man-

agement model one step further, enabling the

partner to offer SAP solutions through its own pri-

vate cloud and on a subscription basis.1 Partners

can create unique and differentiated offerings

that combine software, cloud infrastructure, and

managed services in one complete package at

a low monthly price. Advantages include more

rapid time-to-value and the ability for customers

to shift expenses from “Capital Expenditure” to

“Operational Expenditure” on the balance sheet.

The model is relatively simple and straight-

forward. Partners leverage a term license for SAP

solutions within what they offer for managed

cloud as a service. Depending on the partner-

ship structure, SAP offers further alignment and

support with field resources, as well as other mar-

ket development benefits. Partners, in turn, use

these licenses to create new industry and line-

of-business offerings tailored to customer needs,

including complete management and support of

the customer’s SAP environment.

For example, a large telecommunications com-

pany recently licensed SAP Business One, SAP’s

ERP software for small businesses, to create a new

“ERP-as-a-service” solution for its SME customer

1 To learn more about managed cloud as a service, see “Managed Cloud as a Service: SAP’s On-Premise Applica-tions Delivered as Cloud Solutions by Trusted Partners” by Mitchell Kick on page 25 of this October-December 2013 issue of SAPinsider (SAPinsiderOnline.com).

Subscribe today. Visit SAPinsiderOnline.com.

base. This package enabled the company to pull

through additional solutions and services with

managed cloud as a service. In another partner-

ship, a major retailer across Latin America added

a new IT services line of business that includes

offering SAP software to the company’s tenants.

Both of these partners are enjoying growth in

revenue and profitability due in part to the innova-

tive solutions they can now offer their customers.

Application Development Grows UpIf you’re ultimately interested in selling your

own packaged software, SAP also has a newly

expanded program specifically designed to sup-

port partners across multiple SAP platform

technologies, such as the SAP HANA platform,

SAP HANA Cloud Platform, SAP Mobile Plat-

form, SAP databases, and the SAP NetWeaver

platform. The new SAP PartnerEdge program for

Application Development goes beyond the pre-

vious focus on mobility and SAP HANA Cloud,

which quickly grew to close to 400 partners over

the past year and resulted in approximately 150

partner-created mobile apps in the SAP Store, as

well as hundreds more in various stages of con-

ceptualization and development.

“SAP’s innovations in its mobile technol-

ogy platform have greatly enhanced our ability

to provide our customers with intuitive apps

that integrate back-end SAP data onto a mobile

device,” says Jim Cameron, Partner at Naperville,

Illinois-based ExpertIG. As an enterprise mobil-

ity solutions developer, ExpertIG received a 2013

SAP Pinnacle Award as the Packaged Mobile

Application Innovator of the Year. Cameron

describes the SAP PartnerEdge program as

instrumental in this achievement, as it pro-

vides the tools that partners need to efficiently

develop, market, and sell applications. Any

company that intends to develop packaged

applications for enterprises can join the SAP

PartnerEdge program for Application Develop-

ment. The program provides the opportunity to

market applications through the SAP Store as

well as bundle and resell them with SAP tech-

nology runtime licenses. Designed so developers

everywhere can rapidly build the continuous

innovations that all types of businesses and orga-

nizations require, the program is open to ISVs,

value-added resellers (VARs), SIs, web develop-

ment specialists, and of course, SAP customers.

Undertaking Humanitarian Efforts SAP customers-turned-partners are increas-

ingly taking co-innovation with SAP worldwide

across nearly all market segments and solution

categories. Some of these partners have a spe-

cific altruistic goal in mind, intending to do good

things for people and undertaking worthy social

or environmental causes. One example is the

Carbon Disclosure Project, an OEM technology

partnership that uses embedded business intel-

ligence to help over 3,700 companies benchmark

and manage their own performance and make a

positive contribution to climate change.

Elevate Your BusinessMany SAP customers do not realize that they

can greatly prosper by becoming SAP partners.

As a customer, you experience SAP technology in

ways that can benefit you in a partnership capac-

ity. Co-innovation with SAP can also become

another powerful means of differentiation. By

thinking, planning, and engaging from a partner

perspective, you can transform, elevate, or move

your current business in new directions that may

not have otherwise seemed possible.

For more information on SAP’s partner

programs, visit www.sap.com/partners. n

By thinking, planning, and

engaging from a partner

perspective, you can transform,

elevate, or move your business

in new directions that may not

have otherwise seemed possible.

n“Opening New Doors: SAP Innovation Presents New Opportunities” by Kevin Ichhpurani (SAPinsider, October-December 2012, SAPinsiderOnline.com)

n“The SAP and Intel Co-Innovation Story” by Bill Lawler and Rob Shiveley (insiderPROFILES, April-June 2013, insiderPROFILESonline.com)

Additional Resources