Partners need more air to breathe, not less
Happy Birthday, SAP
It is certainly unique what SAP has created over the years with its partner network, which comprises a total of around 15,000 community companions. Of course, a lot has changed since the company was founded on April 1, 1972 (at this point: Happy Birthday, SAP!) and it has had to reinvent itself again and again in the fast-moving IT industry. Some examples of this are client-server systems with AnyDB, mySAP, Hanaization including S/4 or now Rise with SAP.
Migration concerns
The majority of SAP customers never moved with the changes immediately. The community tends to react with a time lag. This can currently be seen in Rise with SAP. The initiative is being promoted almost overzealously from Walldorf and is almost tantamount to glorifying the company's own cause. However, there is still a lack of customer commitment on a broad front. But what is not, can still become - hope dies last.
On the other hand, some partners were quick to jump on the SAP bandwagon. Often in the hope of benefiting from the innovations initiated in Walldorf. Nevertheless, SAP has always made an effort to orchestrate the community. From a partner and customer perspective, however, it is often not easy to understand why some partners are always more equal than others when it comes to innovations, or why they are favored by SAP.
On top of that, SAP doesn't care whether partners are even in a position to invest in the SAP innovations, run new developments, build up know-how and resources, and much more. Although this would give a much-needed tailwind to such a new SAP thing. The partner business, which is actually based on cooperation, becomes somewhat complicated when SAP enters a subject area with its own product, solution or services and thus makes life difficult for various partners.
The king among databases
The exclusive availability of SAP's Hana database for S/4 is certainly a special case, and the company wanted to put its long-time partner and competitor Oracle - and unfortunately also IBM and Microsoft - out of business, so to speak.
By the way, would SAP not have become the global player it has been for some time without Oracle as a partner? This is a topic that could be discussed in detail. And: Didn't SAP issue the slogan that it wanted to become a leading general database provider in database management with Hana? Strange, in the "DB Engines Ranking" Hana has never been among the ten best databases, but the king (meaning Oracle) has never been toppled.
Shoved in front of the head
From time to time, SAP also takes partners directly to task in order to warn or unsettle one or the other partner in certain respects. However, this is not infrequently done by SAP Sales or SAP Marketing, who seem to be following their own narrative. In this context, SAP would be wisely advised to always encourage partners and give them more breathing room instead of cutting them off. In principle, the reasons are as follows: SAP partners are regarded by SAP customers as a kind of trusted advisor.
Accordingly, customers value partners as effectively neutral entities and look to them for advice and answers to a wide range of questions about SAP and SAP infrastructures. And customers often value partner expertise and advice more highly than that of SAP. SAP should always be aware of this and take it to heart. On top of that, partners also help SAP's cause: If SAP gives its partners enough breathing room, it also benefits itself!
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