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SAP’s global partner efforts are seeing it prioritise its Business AI product and partner autonomy, which in turn is being distilled into its strategy for Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).
A/NZ SAP chief partner officer Ashley McGibbon said that the vendor’s priorities of Business AI and partner autonomy are “really important” for the enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor in the region.
“I think we’ve been really bold and a little bit further along in some areas, particularly around partner autonomy,” she said.
New Zealand has been a particularly standout region for SAP, McGibbon added.
“We’ve essentially provided the whole mid-market business as our partner-driven territory this year,” she said. “I think it will expand absolutely even further next year, but that is definitely — particularly in the APJ [Asia Pacific and Japan] region — a little bit further along than some of the other areas globally at the moment.”
The New Zealand drive comes from the claim that it was easier for the vendor to segment particular elements of the country’s market, McGibbon said.
Across the Tasman, the chief partner officer claimed SAP is doing “very well” with partners in Western Australia and sees it as a “logical first point of call” for next year.
However, the strategy between the two countries is, for the most part, similar. Additionally, McGibbon said the vendor has plans to align Australia and New Zealand with each other in 2025.
SAP’s partner strategy is seemingly working, as the chief partner officer also said SAP has recruited the same number of partners from the start of the year up to August this year as it did during the entirety of 2023.
To meet that level of growth, the vendor’s local partner team is also growing, with two territory ecosystem managers recently hired in New Zealand and one in Brisbane.
“The difference to other roles that we’ve had before is that they are focused on driving success for our partners completely,” McGibbon said.
Looking ahead to the next three to five years months, SAP expects partner autonomy to “really accelerate” and for more partners to lean into the vendor’s Business AI solution, with McGibbon predicting the focus will be on how partners provide support across the “customer value journey”.
“In the past, when we’re in the on-premises world, everything was really focused on that first go live, getting the customer to go live, and we worked with system integrators to get customers to go live. Now we look at implementations in waves.
“My team monitors that from a from an entire an entire A/NZ business perspective and how partners are enabling customers to go live in their waves.”
She continued, saying that she would like to see how partners transform their businesses to support customers across the whole customer value journey – starting with the discovery, understanding requirements and SAP products through to first implementations, first use and then further development to other solutions like Business AI.
“What I’m hoping to see, and we’re already starting to see it, is that our partners see that opportunity to do more with our customers so that they can maintain them across that whole cycle. It’s not just about that first go live anymore,” McGibbon added.