Partner Managed Cloud Model Supports Our GTM Strategy

How was the last year for SAP and its partners?

Last year was great for SAP in India, in the Indian subcontinent rather, and for partners. I'll give you some statistics to support my point. It was a phenomenal year, 2024, and as you'd have seen in the media, SAP has done wonderfully well globally, in the APAC region, and India.

India was one of the strongest forces of growth for SAP in the APJ region, particularly in the partner ecosystem. Partner ecosystem played an important role in the growth that SAP had last year, specifically in taking our customers' journey to the cloud. Talking of specific numbers, partners had a huge contribution to the overall business.

90% of the customer implementations in the cloud happened with the help of our partner ecosystem. And our partners played a front-and-centre role in making sure that the customers were right on track.

India is the largest market for our latest cloud ERP product called SAP for Grow, Grow with SAP. We had our 200th go-live announced just yesterday, which means India has 200 customers who are live on SAP Grow.

 What is your vision for the SAP AI tour? How are partners going to leverage this tour?

SAP's strategy on the product side is to embed AI into every offering that we have. To that effect, we have embedded AI into our cloud ERP solutions and different lines of business solutions.

To implement it for our customers, our partners need to understand how this entire thing works. And our partners did an amazing job of getting themselves enabled, so much so that now they're going and implementing these solutions. That's one part of it.

The second part is our platform story. As a part of a business technology platform, we have created the AI foundation layer on top of that, which gives partners a platform for creating any new AI use cases for any customer, which could be customised for their industry. And our partners today are leveraging that platform extensively to solve the niche problems of our customers, which are beyond SAP's application.

This is the biggest customer event of SAP in India so far, with 40-plus partners who have participated and made this event happen.

It's an opportunity for them to interact with the customers, as well as showcase to our customers the latest technologies that SAP has to provide and what they can do on top of that to bring everything to life.

With the growing usage of generative AI and LLM, how is SAP enabling the partners to stay updated with the latest technology?

We have comprehensively laid out a programme to enable our partners so that they understand how this entire thing works. Because our partners are the change agents for our customers. They implement the solution. We keep doing a lot of digital as well as in-person programs to enable our partners. There are certifications which are centred around AI so that the partners understand and get themselves certified.

We want to make it simple for the customers to also look at the partner competency so that the customers understand which partner comes with what kind of skill set in AI. We have rolled out the programmes, and our partners are taking advantage of those programmes to enable themselves on what is contextual to SAP when we talk about AI.

We are making the strategy clear to our partners, we are enabling them, and we are certifying them as well. 

Moreover, when we do the enablement programmes for our partners, it is open to all their employees who are connected with the SAP ecosystem.

We have university alliances, in which we are rolling out a lot of these programmes focused on the cloud in general and AI in particular. Many of our partners leverage this talent pool from the universities to bring them on board into their organisations to service the Indian market.

We also have programmes for our partners to bring in young talent in the SAP and particularly the AI workforce. And we subsidise the certifications for our partners.

So there is a lot that SAP is investing in terms of content resources as well as real financials to help our partners. 

How are ISVs innovating via these AI-based solutions?

AI is nothing but making our platform even smarter, more robust and scalable. We have a big ISV community.

Our marketplace has more than 2000 applications that our partners have created. And many of these are actually created on top of our platform. With the help of the AI Foundation, opening up this entire thing, including the AI platform, so that the partners can create AI-specific assets.

These are early days because the partners also are trying to learn, enable themselves and then create use cases. The good thing is many of our customers are having active conversations, but it's a journey. They want to make use of whatever is available embedded in our applications first so that they see a return on their investments.

They also want to then solve some of these problem statements that are associated with SAP, which partners understand well. I would say that directionally, we are going well. It will take a few more months for us to have some more monetisable assets that can be taken to the market.

How is SAP enabling its partners to deliver fully managed, scalable cloud services through the MSP model, and how does it align with SAP’s strategy to support customer innovation and transformation?

MSPs play a crucial role in helping us serve a specific segment of customers. Today, different customers have varying requirements, and they also prefer to consume technology in different ways. I’ll break my answer into two parts.

First, for customers who prefer an as-a-service model, the MSP approach offers partners the flexibility to bundle everything—SAP software along with their services—and deliver it as a fully managed service. This model often aligns well with customers' financial expectations. We've seen considerable success with this model globally, including in other parts of the APAC region.

This is typically a one-to-one model, where large partners package and deliver a complete service offering directly to end customers. In India, however, we see a significant opportunity in the broader mid-market segment, which remains under-penetrated and underserved. Our partners can bring SAP solutions—whether it's RISE, GROW, or other line-of-business offerings—to a wider customer base through the as-a-service model.

To summarise, the Partner Managed Cloud model is a strategic priority for us. It supports our market expansion goals and go-to-market strategy, and we believe it will play a key role in bringing many net new customers to SAP.

Which new regions are touched upon in India with the help of partners?

In terms of our presence in the Indian market. In the cloud world particularly, we have customers from more than 240 cities in India. And these 240 cities are covered only with the help of our partner ecosystem.

We have examples of partners transforming the smallest of the customers by using SAP technology. We are totally partner-driven in our approach in terms of going to the hinterland of India.

We started the pilot last year. India is one of the first market units to get onto this pilot of looking at how we maximise our potential in geographies of India where SAP has not been very predominantly present.

We looked at the number of states in India that contribute effectively to India's GDP, but when we looked at SAP's penetration of SAP's revenue, we saw that there was a lot more unlocked potential for us. For the last year, we have extensively worked with our partner ecosystem.

This year, we have taken it to a larger number of states. All those 20 states plus the entire South, where we want to go to the nooks and corners of the southern part of India, we have reached out with the help of our partners.

We are giving incentives to the partners. We are giving a lot of funding to our partners to generate the right kind of demand because you have to go to those locations, talk about SAP and talk about how it can transform the business of the smallest of organisations.

How does SAP support service partners in accelerating customer adoption?

We have got a partner-led services programme, and we have got a good number of partners who are a part of this programme. In fact, the ecosystem in India is not only focused on Indian customers. They also cater to the GCCs.

They also cater to global customers as well, and hence, we will have the largest number of partners in our ecosystem, with more than 2,000 across sales, services, build, etc. The programme is enabling the partners, ensuring that they use the right methodologies to implement the cloud solutions that are available to our service partners as well, and they take a lot of benefits from these programmes. In addition to that, all the certifications that are relevant in the cloud world are being offered to all our service partners, and again, they make it a point to get their consultants certified.

We have mandated that a certain percentage of the consultants on every customer implementation be certified on SAP's solution so that the quality is ensured and minimal intervention from SAP is required. We understands our responsibility as an OEM, and we get involved because, at the end of the day, we have to be solving the customer's problem. When I look at the journey specifically in the cloud in the last three years, we have seen the ecosystem getting mature, resulting in India having those kinds of encouraging numbers in terms of the number of online customers.

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