SAP TheInsideTrack Promise of the Future Q1 2025 by SAPMidmarket

Promise of the Future InsideTrack THE

Sustainability

Islet Group & the Green Ledger

Business Data Cloud Everything you need to know

Mohamed Khan on the SAP MEA North region

The Essential Update for SAP Partners

The InsideTrack Contents

Q1 2025 Edition

Spotlight on... EMEA 2025

Rafael Brugnini, Chief Partner Officer, and Pablo Signorelli, Head of EMEA Corporate, on the opportunity that lies ahead for partners this year.

Partner Business Essentials

The all-new SAP Business Data Cloud and a new, simplified, PartnerEdge programme for the new year.

The Innovation Conversation

Jesper Schleimann and Peter Matejka on what happens now with artificial intelligence.

Special Feature: Sustainability

Finland partner Islet Group reveals how it's helped one customer to apply the SAP Green Ledger to its carbon accounting. Plus Lindsey Rowe, SAP’s Head of Strategic Programmes & Sustainability, on sustainability and all its touchpoints.

The View from Here

Mohamed Samee Khan of SAP MEA North on what makes his region unique.

The SAP EMEA Partner Hall of Fame

Introducing the winners of the SAP EMEA Partner Excellence Awards 2025!

Network

News

The latest news updates and diary dates.

Spotlight EMEA 2025

The Land of Opportunity

Rafael Brugnini, Chief Partner Officer, EMEA, outlines the opportunity for partners in 2025 from the addressable cloud market to the solutions and architecture in place to help customers to remain successful.

Pablo Signorelli, Head of EMEA Corporate, looks at the opportunity for his segment of the market.

The last twelve months were privotal for SAP EMEA, with the merging of two regions (north and south) and a major restructure. It was also a year of performance, with every area of the business delivering thanks to the innovation, insight and experience of the partner ecosystem.

This year, the opportunity comes in the form of a huge €85billion addressable cloud market. Of that, 39% is linked to the development of solutions on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which now includes embedded artificial intelligence. From this, 62% can be addressed through SAP’s new Business Data Cloud.

With such an opportunity up for the taking, the question is, how can it be captured? The answer, says Rafa, lies in ‘a very strong and solid ecosystem.’

“It’s impossible for SAP to capture that business. It has to be SAP and our partners. And we performed amazingly together in 2024 – from our global service partners to our value added retailers to our software partners. We have done very, very well, together.

“Whether we want to seize this new opportunity in front of us is up to us all. I don’t know how long it will be available for, so it depends on how strong we want to push the throttle and how fast we want to go.”

The ‘cherry on top’ is found in a study from PWC which revealed that 42% of chief executive officers currently believe their

businesses will no longer be viable in 10 years’ time IF they don’t change course now and adopt new technologies.

“We,” says Rafa, “with our partners, have the magic recipe to change that course.”

SAP Business Suite Will Help to Capture the Opportunity

The SAP Business Suite will ‘spearhead’ partners’ efforts to capture the market opportunity, helping businesses to run more efficiently and to scale thanks to connected, SAP-industry-focused, solutions.

To win, Rafa says SAP and partners need to:

• Create value: by positioning the SAP Business Suite and selling up-market

• GROW volume: by scaling and winning net new names. “The beauty of the SAP Business Suite is it’s a modular solution which means customers can start anywhere and expand later,” adds Rafa

• Drive adoption: by making sure customers see success from the solutions they consume – “we have to drive customer satisfaction,” says Rafa

• Differentiate! By building complementary solutions to tailor the SAP Business Suite to a partner’s country and target industry

“If we’re going to grab the opportunity in front of us with both hands, we need to change the way we sell – with packages; we need to change the way we create demand. We need to be fishing with a net, not a single line. To catch that opportunity we need to change the way we operate. Of course this has implications but we’ve made that change here at SAP and I would urge our partners to do the same. “If our partners can make that change and if together with them we can create value, grow volume, drive adoption and differentiate, we’ll be in a great space to win big in that market,” he concludes.

EMEA Corporate and Pablo Signorelli

Head of EMEA Corporate – formerly EMEA Midmarket – Pablo Signorelli is also buoyant about the land of opportunity that lies ahead for partners and their customers’ success.

The big three headline numbers for Pablo’s market segment are:

• A €44 billion addressable market –representing a phenomenal potential revenue stream

• 98% of companies in the corporate market space are not yet SAP customers

• 77% of fast-growing corporate companies are investing in one single

‘source of truth’ with generative AI capabilities built-in: enter the SAP Business Suite

How does Pablo see partners seizing those revenue, customer and Business Suite growth opportunities?

“The game plan is to win new customers with public cloud ERP and we’ll do this via SAP Business Suite and GROW with SAP. “We’ll look to increase our solution footprint in the installed cloud base – again via SAP Business Suite – and move existing, onprem, customers to cloud applications and SAP Business Suite via RISE with SAP.”

Pablo and his team will be there to work with partners, helping them to independently drive campaigns, relationships and delivery across the entire customer value journey with the lowest cost of sales in pre-defined territories.

“We’ll drive market reach by following a partner-first philosophy. The partners with the right industry and geographical expertise will be involved with new business wins from the very beginning and encourage them to push customers to the SAP Business Suite. In turn, partners will need to consider how they might need to adapt their own businesses and invest in SAP to deliver that complete customer value journey.”

SAP Launches Business Data Cloud

Introducing SAP Business Data Cloud with Databricks plus the latest updates on SAP PartnerEdge.

SAP Business Data Cloud was unveiled by CEO Christian Klein and executive board member, SAP Product & Engineering, Muhammad Alam in February, and spearheads SAP’s “AI-first, Suite-first” strategy.

The fully managed, software-as-a-service (SaaS), solution has been created to help customers to adopt business AI and the SAP Business Suite faster.

Business Data Cloud establishes a harmonised data foundation, enabling customers to roll Business AI out across all their data. As an evolution of SAP’s industry-leading data, planning, and analytics solutions, Business Data Cloud brings together Datasphere, Analytics Cloud, and Business Warehouse, into one unified experience that delivers transformational insights across all lines of business. And, through SAP’s landmark partnership with Databricks, the power of Databricks is built directly into SAP Business Data Cloud. This marks a new era in enterprise data management with two leaders in their respective domains coming together to redefine how applications and data platforms work together.

“SAP Business Data Cloud unleashes the full value of enterprise data for business AI,” Christian said. “It combines SAP’s unique expertise in semantically rich, missioncritical, end-to-end data with Databricks’

prowess in data engineering to create a oneof-a-kind solution that helps organisations do more with their data than ever before.”

Currently, companies spend as much as fifty percent of their total IT budget on data and analytics, trying to bring these data sources together without building a continuous, unified data layer. This hampers their ability to realise the full potential of their data landscape. But now, in the age of AI, having one common semantical data layer for business data is key.

Francesca Carboni, Partner Solution Success VP, EMEA added: “The arrival of SAP Business Data Cloud is going to revolutionise the way our customers access data that is comprehensive and insightful and which will enable them to make quick, confident, business decisions. I’m excited to start working with our partners in EMEA to get them ready to support their customers in rolling the solution out.”

Business Data Cloud...

...helps businesses unleash transformative new insights with prebuilt analytical applications and curated SAP data products.

...connects all SAP and third-party data with SAP and Databricks into a fully managed SaaS solution. ...is a trusted data foundation to deliver the most reliable AI in the industry.

What is SAP Business Suite?

SAP Business Suite is a unique enterprise management offering that brings together SAP business applications, the new SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Business AI solutions, enhanced with Joule AI agents and powered by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).

“Now, as we head deeper into 2025, we’re very excited about how SAP Business Data Cloud will enable SAP Business AI to continue to revolutionise the way companies run and end-users work,” said Christian Klein.

‘Change for the Better’: The Latest on SAP PartnerEdge

SAP has responded to partner feedback and updated the PartnerEdge programme for 2025 in a bid to make it easier to use.

Morgan Lynch, SAP PartnerEdge Programme Lead, said that although partners say the programme changes ‘too often’, the updates coming this year will be changes ‘for the better’.

“We are making the programme simpler and easier for our partners to understand and get the most out of it,” he explained.

One of the biggest areas of change will be in the alignment between PartnerEdge and SAP’s strategic priorities, namely cloud and Business AI. “We want everybody to move together towards our common goals and not operate in isolation,” said Morgan. “We know that our partners and our customers – of all sizes and across all industries – are

accelerating towards agile, flexible, cloud solutions. So, to get the most out of SAP, cloud has to be a focus.”

Therefore, in 2025, PartnerEdge will become ‘100% cloud focused’, rewarding partners that are aligned to SAP’s strategy and recognising the contributions they make to the customer value journey via a series of tiered benefits and funds.

Another change is in the partner levels. A new partner level – the initial ‘base level’ for partners – has been introduced and the way partners move up levels is being altered.

Daily ‘level-ups’ are replacing the end-ofmonth level movements, so if a partner meets the threshold for the new level, they will move up the next day (instead of at the end of the month), and reap all the benefits that come with that shift. And, to keep things

as partner-friendly as possible, the level down will be safeguarded for two hundred days.

“If partners stay for a minimum of two hundred days at their level and then deliver a different performance, they’ll enter that safeguarding period,” explained Morgan.

“If at any stage within that timeframe partners meet the threshold again, they’ll be automatically back up to their level. There will be absolutely no effect on their partnership. If, at any stage in the future, they dip below again – for whatever reason – they get a fresh two hundred days.”

The new, base-level partner level is followed by the two performing levels of silver and gold. In addition, there’s the strategic –platinum – level, which is invitation-only and has the highest benchmarks within SAP.

Each level has a set of cloud metrics, measuring performance. Partners should liaise with their Partner Business Managers or visit the portal to find out which metrics are relevant to them.

The changes take effect from April and, as Morgan says, they’re all designed to drive greater benefits and more relevant services for partners.

“In 2025, PartnerEdge will become ‘100% cloud focused’, rewarding partners that are aligned to SAP’s strategy.

“The more our partners work with SAP, the greater they perform, the more strategically aligned they are to SAP’s priorities, the more we will give back in return. And we want to make sure that the right partners get the right services from SAP. With the new base partner level and the silver and gold performing levels, we will be able to identify which partners are joining us on our cloud journey and give them the access they need to our training and areas of expertise.”

The rebate and funding programmes have also been reviewed and simplified for the new year, based on partner feedback. The rebates programme has been reworked to reflect cloud sales achievements versus targets. Sales in strategic areas – particularly GROW with SAP – will be rewarded and there will be higher rebates for partner-led territory GROW sales.

Both the MDF and BDF funds have been replaced with a new development fund which went live on January 1st. Instead of two different sets of funds – bringing with them two different processes, two different sets of compliance rules and two different SAP investments – having one development fund removes complexity for the partner. The fund will be used to drive alignment between SAP priorities and partner success, helping to create new business opportunities and drive sales for their SAP solutions, as well as generating revenue from partners’ own IP.

But it’s not just about demand generation. The development fund is also there to aid partners in up-skilling, in funding the right training programmes, to ensure their businesses are equipped for success.

“This is about investing in opportunities now but also into partners’ future growth opportunities,” adds Morgan.

And the beauty of the new development fund is it’s not capped like the previous funding systems. Partners don’t have to have earned the funds and they can request

“This new fund has been developed to make it much easier for partners to access the funds they need and to get those funds paid out faster.

amounts ‘above and beyond’ what’s on their balance, if aligned to SAP priorities. Any outstanding funds remaining from the old MDF and BDF programmes will have been transferred over.

“This new fund has been developed to make it much easier for partners to access the funds they need and to get those funds paid out faster. And, if a partner has a bigger campaign that they’d like to roll out in 2025, if it aligns to our priorities, they can apply for larger funds. I’d advise them to talk to their PBMs and connect with their SAP contacts to find out more.”

The SAP Partner Finder where customers can find a partner that meets their needs is being updated again in 2025. It lists a whole swathe of different competencies. Morgan and team have introduced a business transformation management competency and this year, there’ll be a change in the requirements needed to meet the RISE competency. Morgan advises partners to check out these changes to understand what they mean for them. For those partners who already have a competency, there’s guidance on how to maintain it.

“It’s important,” adds Morgan, “that partners make sure their Partner Finder profile is up to date.”

Ultimately, all the new changes are here to help partners to enjoy success in 2025. “We’re here to make our partners’ lives as simple as possible, keeping their priorities aligned to ours, and giving them the tools, support and funds they need to deliver. I’d urge all our partners to get in touch with their PBMs to understand how the new changes will impact them for the better,” he says.

“We’re here to make our partners’ lives as simple as possible, keeping their priorities aligned to ours, and giving them the tools, support and funds they need to deliver.

Ai: Foundation for the Future

If 2024 was all about getting artificial intelligence adopted by customers, 2025 is about taking a fresh approach to helping customers to see the actual value the technology can bring to their businesses and their people. Chief AI Officer at SAP, Jesper Schleimann, and Peter Matejka, AI Lead for EMEA, highlight the challenges, and the opportunities, for partners this year.

Some three thousand plus partner employees completed online AI courses last year – five times higher than in 2023. They attended in-person events, they actively used the generative artificial intelligence hub – found on SAP Business Technology Platform – and turned proof of concepts into qualified packaged solutions.

“We made amazing progress as an ecosystem last year,” says Jesper. “We moved the needle without a doubt.”

But this year, some things need to be done ‘significantly’ differently; the ‘rulebook needs to be re-written’. Here he outlines the challenges that need to be overcome in 2025.

CHALLENGE 1: Results

While last summer was ‘red hot’ for AI adoption among customers, the results haven’t translated to the bottom line, for lots of different reasons.

That’s why, says Jesper, a shift of focus is needed, moving from ‘technology for technology’s sake’ to how to really deliver business results and true value for customers.

The first step is to open conversations up with customers using embedded AI capabilities in SAP solutions – and there

are more than 130 of these in existence with more coming throughout the next twelve months.

“It’s time to forget about the technology being the lead angle to start a conversation about AI,” explains Jesper. “Start by finding the right business example that will be of interest to your customer and go from there.”

CHALLENGE 2:

Changing the Game

The adoption of AI in and of itself is a challenge. Equipping people with the skills to use it effectively is time-consuming –and costly.

“It’s clear we need to provide dedicated AI services – along with our partners – to help guide our customers through adoption and use of AI,” Jesper says. “And we need to also position, very importantly, a scalable, shared platform with our customers; only then can they reduce cost, start to accelerate other projects fast and get to that exponential growth.

“Once we're in the game, we need to change the game. We need to help educate our customers on what is true enterprise AI. It's not just about AI for the technology, it's also about the data and business processes. Those three things are the flywheel for success.”

CHALLENGE 3:

Speed of Change

AI is moving faster than ever, due to all new applications being built on AI infrastructure.

Says Jesper: “The prompt window is the new RAM, the large language model is the new CPU, and the models are doubling capacity every six months. So we need to help not only show our roadmap, but also build a customer specific vision to win the game with our customers.”

“It's not just about AI for the technology, it's also about the data and business processes.

The plan is to make AI the new UI. Enterprise agents will be scaled and SAP will introduce its own models. The immediate values of intregrating AI into classical business processes means that SAP can address ‘well-known’ business needs.

For instance, while many customers use SAP’s financial software, they experience challenges in the closing process. Now, using generative AI, those customers can not only pinpoint where those challenges are but also find the ‘magical path’ to resolution.

In addition, AI can be used as both an assistant and an advisor, using a range of underlying technologies such as Joule. Embedded within SAP and its cloud products, it can quickly help a customers to pull together a report but a report that’s grounded in data, to deliver a report of much higher quality.

Responsible, Relevant and Reliable

“There is so much more to come,” says Jesper. “What’s important is to understand that, as we continue to position AI, we all recognise the foundational pillars of what makes long-term success, but also what differentiates us as an ecosystem in the game of AI.

“And there are three crucial components. I believe that any AI needs to be not only responsible, but also relevant and reliable to truly scale. And we will make this happen uniquely by embedding our enterprise grade, cloud level security, into our tools.

“We will ground AI by embracing business data and business processes. SAP data is an amazing treasure trove, and we will use it to make our AI explainable and clear and transparent.

Using the platform of the world's greatest business processes at scale, generating that level of data, we will use that data to feed into our AI, to make it into an even better AI. AI that will drive better and more business processes, processes that will run even faster to generate even more data.

“So we have the basis for a recurring loop, which is exactly what we need. And that's

our unfair advantage that no one else can replicate in this industry. It’s also exactly what our customers need to get up and running to truly become an intelligent enterprise.”

However, as Jesper continues, partners in line with SAP also need to think ‘beyond tomorrow’.

That mindset is how new applications are developed ‘at the border of what’s possible’.

“We will make AI the new UI. We will make sure that it is embedded in all applications, transforming the user experience, but also increasing the amount of addressable users of applications as well as the value our customers get out of it.

“I believe we are at the forefront of a three year cycle where many applications will be rebuilt from scratch using the AI generic frameworks, and I think SAP is uniquely positioned because we have the data, the tools and the authorisation to make this work at scale.”

Partner Priorities for 2025

Peter Matejka on the priorities for partners in EMEA this year.

1 Partner Success Stories

Peter and his team want to hear from partners on early-adopter customer success stories. Those stories will be shared externally to drive publicity for partners, particularly if the solutions have Joule or other AI capabilities embedded in them, together with AI that’s been developed by a partner.

2 Win AI Sales

For partners to develop their own value propositions, their own go-to-market campaigns, potentially their own IP to include SAP Business AI to secure new customer wins. “Whether it is with RISE, with GROW or any of our solutions, we want our partners to be able to pitch their offer to customers to win sales, by including a strong AI value proposition,” explains Peter.

3 AI Adoption

Peter is clear that adoption doesn’t need to be around a difficult or complex new solution. Taking Joule as an example, the free-mium model can be used straight away offering up a very low barrier to entry for customers who want to start using SAP Business AI.

Plus, there are plenty of customers who have SAP Business Technology Platform credits available to them, which can be used on all of the AI services available within BTP. This is where partners need to guide their customers on how to adopt and use those services.

“This year we really do need our partners to help us to meet those three priorities, to focus their attention and deliver great business value to their customers with SAP Business AI.”

To help partners, SAP teams are providing partners with updates, resources and assets on SAP Business AI which can be found on the PartnerEdge portal.

Sustainability SPECIAL FEATURE

Lindsey Rowe, Head of Strategic Programmes and Sustainability at SAP, talks about what a “sustainable business” looks like in practice.

Plus, how Islet Group is helping customers to account for its carbon with SAP’s Green

Ledger.

Lindsey Rowe says SAP acts as both an enabler – of the technology and services that help its partners to be sustainable –and as an exemplar (SAP is ranked the fifteenth most sustainable organisation in the world, according to Time Magazine) when it comes to sustainability, and is in a strong position to have informed conversations with customers and partners to help them on their own sustainability journeys.

While legislation plays a key role in ensuring companies are sticking to sustainable practices, Lindsey says it’s a topic that now impacts consumer demand, supply chain practices and in attracting and retaining talent.

She says: “We’re seeing more candidates asking companies what their stance on sustainability is and they really want to get into the detail. It’s important that companies can demonstrate and prove that they’re ethical and sustainable.”

At the heart of this is data, to enable companies to meet the necessary regulations but to also take action, change processes and meet various key performance indicators (KPIs).

Not only is it a priority. It’s top priority” “

Lindsey Rowe

“Across any organisation there’s usually very differing KPIs across different parts and functions, from legal to procurement and so-on,” explains Lindsey. “Trying to stitch all those things together is a challenge. One of the things we’re doing at SAP is to bring those individual departments together and talk about how they’re going to achieve their sustainability goals together and bring it into their core data and technology strategy.”

Positively, Lindsey says she sees sustainability coming to life ‘every day’ from changes to legislation to real-world examples such as the customers using SAP’s responsible design and production to design plastic out of the supply chain entirely.

As sustainability continues to evolve, with legislation accelerating change, Lindsey sees artificial intelligence as the future.

“Whilst AI models have huge sustainability impacts, there are many studies – and two in particular from BCG and McKinsey – on how AI will unlock the answer to climate change. That I think will be fascinating.”

Sustainability is “everything and everywhere” and is no longer a ‘nice-tohave’ or a ‘fluffy’ topic.

“Not only is it a priority, it’s a top priority,” adds Lindsey. “In the last five years, it’s gone from someone within an organisation, working in the background and keeping track of carbon emissions, to being a part of c-level conversations around brand and legislation.”

Islet Group is a leading SAP partner in Finland. Family-owned – and run –it champions sustainability in all its guises.

Here, Paula Warmer, Strategic Comms Director, Team PES, chats to Islet Group CEO Janina Luoto, about the benefits of SAP’s Green Ledger.

Click here to watch

The View from Here SPECIAL FEATURE

Mohamed ‘Samee’ Khan, Channel Head, Middle East and Africa North, joins The Inside Track this quarter, sharing his experience of business life in his diverse region.

Inside Track: Which part of SAP EMEA do you cover?

Samee Khan: “I’m responsible for the Middle East and Africa North cluster, which starts from Pakistan and Afghanistan in the East, comes across the Middle East and goes as far as Francophone Africa.

The exciting part – and the part that keeps me and the team passionate – is that it’s quite diverse in terms of work and personal cultures. Each country carries its own unique perspective. It keeps life very

interesting. There is of course a common thread because we deal with partners who are similar in their outlook and focus but they each bring their own flavour.

It is humbling and it’s also a privilege to work in this region – we don’t get that diversity in every part of the world.”

Inside Track: What’s the best thing about working in your MU?

Samee Khan: “Definitely the diversity. The second is I feel privileged to be part of this partner community – as a partner management team we touch every single part of the SAP business, we effectively are part of sales, financials and collections and enablement for pre-sales; the entire life cycle, that’s a real reason to be in the partner business. Finally, the fact that we’re working with external partner companies and supporting them to grow is incredibly rewarding.”

very beginning point of technology adoption and others which have really jumped ahead. Each area has its own flavour and, what I find very interesting is that the North African countries have religious and cultural threads that tie them to the Middle East but their economic ties come from Europe.”

Inside Track: What’s your top priority for 2025?

Samee Khan: “The number one priority is the enablement of our partners on SAP products, solutions, the whole gamut. This year, in particular, we are driving towards

“The number one priority is the enablement of our partners on SAP products, solutions, the whole gamut.

Inside Track: And what makes MEA North unique?

Samee Khan: “Apart from the diversity, as mentioned, it’s the scale of maturity versus emerging markets in our territory that makes it so different. In our cluster, there are countries which are really at the

partner automony whereby the entire customer value journey is to be driven by the partner, starting from demand gen and then developing the opportunity, getting the sales done, signing up, delivering and then supporting the customer. That’s the new go-to-market by SAP and in my opinion, it’s key. Our partners really will be

“The SAP Business Suite with its industry flavours built on BTP with AI embedded means we’re right at the cusp of what the market requires.

an extension of SAP, and that goes as far as whatever we are training our folks on internally, we will want to replicate it out to our partners and we’ll play a coaching and mentoring role, where we can prescribe the mechanism and methodologies to our partners too.

The second priority is pipeline generation, which is a key area that we need to focus on. I believe the first part – the automony –will come as long as partners are building and developing pipeline which we can then support them on.

If we get those two things right [partner enablement and pipeline generation], then everything else will fall into place.”

Inside Track: What are the opportunities for partners?

Samee Khan: “The maturity of the market and therefore the level of digitisation in

each market will drive the type of partner we need in each country. While SAP is heavily prescribing cloud and now SAP Business Suite with artificial intelligence embedded, some of these elements are becoming relevant in the emerging markets but in others, they’re not quite there yet. We are therefore pioneering some of those conversations with our partners.

Sometimes our partners are having to balance their skill sets – both their on-prem legacy skill sets because the customer is holding back, but at the same time they need to build and grow skill sets in new areas.

And then you shift to the more mature markets where they’ve moved away from legacy and are fully focused on investing and building out new technology and methodologies.”

Inside Track: What are you most excited about in 2025?

Samee Khan: “There are two things I’m excited about. First, from a tech readiness perspective, SAP has never been as ready for the market’s needs right now. The SAP Business Suite with its industry flavours built on BTP with AI embedded means we’re right at the cusp of what the market requires, so that’s very exciting in itself. We’re in a position where we can go to a partner with confidence and have that conversation to say that, from a product point of view and from an SAP go-tomarket point of view, there’s nothing to be worried about because we’re right in the sweet spot.

And the second is the fact that SAP is now fully looking to drive its coverage through the ecosystem. Our partners are closest to the customer, they’re on-the-ground, they understand the market, they understand the industries, and now, with new tech, they are the most relevant ‘tool’ we have at SAP to get into those markets and cover them properly. So these are very exciting times.”

Inside Track: What are the challenges facing MEA North and your partners?

Samee Khan: “So I would argue that the diversity is a blessing and sometimes a curse. The difference in maturity levels creates a challenge for us. SAP is going through a transformation which results in us being very prescriptive in terms of driving this change, and that extends to our partners as well. The challenge with being prescriptive is that when you’ve got low maturity levels, what we’re prescribing doesn’t necessarily fit. On the flip side, we have others that are in a position to adopt the new tech. So for us the biggest challenge is going to be managing that balance. We have some very good partners that are extremely invested and committed to SAP but they’re in a market which is not at that level of maturity. They’re solid companies that in the future will be very strong for SAP, so we need to bring them along with us as the same time as those who are adopting us quickly. We need to think long term as well as short term.”

Inside Track: What’s your biggest focus for the year?

Samee Khan: “It’s about how we manage the balance that I’ve just described, and we’ve some great ideas on how we’ll do that. Collaboration is one route, not just between us and our partners but partnerto-partner too. That way we bring the emerging and the mature together. Then, if I look at the expectation for us as a team, it is to enable our partners and keep them ready to transact and develop pipeline.”

Mohamed ‘Samee’ Khan

How Did I Get Here?

“I joined SAP in the year 2000 in Johannesburg, South Africa. At the time SAP did not have a partner business, we were fully direct.

When one of my colleagues left, I replaced him in the role of product and solution management, working with implementation partners.

“I was in that role for five years and then, at the end of that period, SAP introduced the indirect market for the first time and I was involved in developing some of that nascent work in Africa.

“For personal reasons, I left Africa and relocated to Dubai, at a time when SAP had no presence in the Middle East and was only available through a distributor. Within a year, SAP had acquired that distributor and I was one of the first of SAP’s Middle East employees, joining in 2007.

“That became the starting point of SAP Middle East and Africa; I was one of the first 35 people to work there and I’ve pretty much been with the company ever since! My role has always been partnerfocused.

“I Firmly believe in the company and I’m very passionate about the role I carry. I’m SAP blue-blooded!”

Connect with Samee on Linkedin

Introducing the SAP EMEA Partner Excellence Hall of Fame!

Congratulations to all the winners in this year’s SAP EMEA Partner Excellence Awards for work delivered in 2024.

GSSP Partners

VAR Partners

LOBs

Highest Cloud ACV for HXM

Winning Partner

Software Partners

Network News

The latest news updates for partners from across the region and SAP.

Register now for the Partner Innovation Meeting

The date for the first Partner Innovation Meeting of 2025 is set for Tuesday, 14th May and will take place inperson and online for partners across EMEA.

Expect an agenda full of the latest news from SAP, inspirational and insightful success stories from partners and the opportunity to put questions to the SAP EMEA leadership team.

To register to attend, please register using the link below:

Pitch Perfect: New SAP Business Suite Academies

Running until May, a series of 10 virtual learning sessions are now live to equip partners with the essential skills they need to master the SAP Business Suite and help them to deliver compelling, successful, pitches to customers and prospects.

What’s more, it will lead partners through the ‘Positioning SAP Business Suite’ learning journeys, helping them to prepare to sit the related certification exam.

Gain Competitive Advantage on SAP Business Technology Platform

Partners can now become certified – and remain certified – on SAP Business Technology Platform AND take advantage of a series of academies.

The InsideTrack

The Essential Upate for SAP Partners.

Illustrating the Inside Track

This edition of the Inside Track features the stunning illustrative work of Lydia Hill, a freelance illustrator based in Sheffield, England. Her diverse and quirky style is much in demand among clients such as AWS, Trustpilot, Vauxhall and Hoefler&Co.