Sapphire Vintage 2022
The young SAP board members praised this innovative collaboration because they were obviously unaware of the past. Back in 2016, there was an intense friendship and partnership between Apple CEO Tim Cook and SAP CEO Bill McDermott. So now it's happening again! Wikipedia writes, Vintage is a style in fashion and design in which older, usually used, items of clothing, furniture, musical instruments, jewelry, accessories, pictures, vehicles or other utilitarian objects are reused or imitated. It's not much different with SAP's new love affair with its partners: Over the past 50 years, partners have been praised time and again, and Accenture, Siemens, Lenovo, IBM, InfoSys, McKinsey, Ecovadis, etc. have been brought onto the Sapphire stage - as long as SAP could make a profit from it.
It remains a running gag; when an SAP partner comes to Walldorf, he is greeted with the words: "What can you do for SAP?" It will be similar this time: After a few months, SAP again loses interest in a partnership on an equal footing and partner support migrates to India. By then at the latest, SAP partners will once again despair of the opaque communication channels and turn to other IT providers such as Microsoft, Google or Amazon. SAP partner management was and remains a yo-yo game, and no Sapphire can hide that fact.
A current Summary of SAP's Partner Community can be read in the Handelsblatt by my colleague Christof Kerkmann.