It was 1972 when five former IBM employees set up Systems, Applications and Processing in Data Management - thankfully shortened to SAP, their intention was to "develop standard application software for real-time business processing. As of today, SAP is one of the largest independent software supplier in the world with more 388,000 customers in more than 180 countries, 25 industry-specific business solutions and 12 lines of business, more than 156 million subscribers in our cloud user base.
SAP and its partners must effectively work together to serve customers
“Together, with our customers and partners, we can transform industries, grow economies, lift up societies, and sustain our environment.”- Bill McDermott, CEO, SAP SE
“No company can go it alone in the digital economy.” .”- Bill McDermott, CEO, SAP SE
SAP gives immense value to its partner. Our partners are an essential part of developing, co-innovation, (re)selling, implementing, and hosting solutions. SAP has more than 17000+ Partner companies globally. Partners are engaged with nearly 90% of new SAP customers. Nearly 55% of all SAP S/4HANA software license deals have been won by partners.
One of the challenges the ecosystem faces is to determine how to work together to serve the customers effectively.
For many of SAP partners, SAP on one hand represents a huge opportunity for them to expand their business into the larger SAP customer base to offer solutions that are complimentary to what SAP offers. On the other hand, it’s also a huge challenge to figure out what’s the right thing to do and whom to work with within SAP given the large portfolio of solutions offered by SAP.
When a prospect partner starts to explore opportunities with SAP, it often feels like stepping into complex world with too many options and challenge to ascertain the right approach.
Partners typically have the following questions and asks when they want to invest in building cutting-edge innovations:
Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services(PLS)
To address these challenges, the Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services works closely with partners to transform ideas into innovative solutions.
Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services is
one stop shop for co-innovation with sap. It’s a global organization in SAP with presence in 10+ countries catering to projects across globe.
The mission of Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services is to offer services to partners to accelerate market adoption of both SAP and partner portfolios.
Both customers and partners benefit from the services offered by Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services. For customers, they can leverage larger portfolio of solutions from partners on top of SAP’s own product portfolio. For partners, it creates new business, opportunity to expand their business across geographies, fosters growth, drives brand visibility, and helps build alliances.
Services offered by SAP PLS
If you are a partner looking for co-innovation opportunities with SAP or looking for certifying your innovations and operations or any of the following:
- Interested in accelerating your innovative idea?
- Have an innovative idea or use case to accelerate your development lifecycle?
- Plan to migrate and optimize existing solution(s) or develop new solution(s) on SAP Cloud Platform, SAP S/4HANA or other SAP Products?
- Interested in accelerating your development with end to end build support?
For all the needs mentioned above, Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services can be one stop shop. It offers key services in a structured end-to-end engagement framework. It also acts as your trusted advisor from inception through realization and will collaborate with SAP experts to help accelerate your innovation lifecycle.
The key services offered by Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services are:
- Co-innovated with SAP offering – end to end service along with branding
- Outsourcing Partner Certification
- Software Integration Certification
- Hardware Certification
This blog explicitly addresses how partners can leverage the Co-Innovated with SAP service.
Co-innovated with SAP offering – end to end service along with branding
No company can provide everything its customers need. Co-innovation comes into picture when a company works its partners for the greater good of its customers. At Partner Innovation Lifecycle Service, we offer a very unique, tailor made program for partners who are looking for opportunities by co-innovating with us
.
Opportunities for partners to build innovations around Intelligent Enterprise
Building the Intelligent Enterprise is one of the biggest opportunities SAP partners have had in years. The partner ecosystem going to be critical for us to drive success. We believe the next generation business process is going to come from the data that's in the application, and creating intelligent algorithms based on the industry context and the customer’s expertise. That's where partners are going to come into play.
The second component is the cloud platform, where we are going to have a lot of open APIs available. Partners can leverage these APIs, leverage our core technologies, and start building next generation applications. And then have them available on the SAP App Center.
And third is intelligent technologies, the Leonardo platform. With the power of SAP data, the cloud platform, and SAP Leonardo, we will have an opportunity to completely reinvent new business models, do core innovation that nobody has done so far. And that's where the partner ecosystem comes into play, working with Leonardo. There’s been a lot of great work done by our partners since we launched Leonardo, and there's opportunity to take that even higher this year.
Close alignment between Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services, Industries and LoB’s development organizations helps bring the required expertise and ensure a competitive partner solution in the market place. Our intent is to support partners to deliver best quality products for not only their own ideas but also for ideas or use cases that may be shared by SAP in select industries or line of business solutions.
For partners, Co-innovated with SAP offering can be briefed in one line –
Walk in with an idea, walk out with a product.
Co-Innovated with SAP – service overview
Reference quotes from partners
“The joint engagement with SAP has been very positive. The Best Practices received from SAP during the project have been very helpful to build a state-of-the-art Solution. Further joint engagements with SAP are already in the planning. Thanks for your support.”
- Uwe Sester – VP for Innovation and Products at Camelot ITLab GmbH
“Working together with SAP within the Co-innovated with SAP Service was extremely helpful to get our application to the SAP Cloud platform and to get successfully through all necessary SAP processes. Without the Co-innovated with SAP team that guided us, our small team would not have been able to utilize the SAP Cloud platform components in a comparably short time to their fullest potential. The Co-innovated with SAP team had helpful advice in every step.
On top, the Co-innovated with SAP logo shows this collaboration also to our customers. This elevates our services to a new level of trustworthiness and embodies our innovative capabilities.”
- Daniel Göhlen, Managing Director, BlackHorse One GmbH
“Co-Innovated with SAP” service from Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services is an amazing program, offering loads of guidance throughout the engagement, ensuring that the partner adheres to the SAP standards, along with the comprehensive documentation that eases the rollout to the customers. The brand gives high quality assurance to the customers that the product meets world class standards & thoroughly tested by SAP professionals. It also helped us go-to-market quicker than what we anticipated and hence we highly recommend the program to other partners as there is great value for money."
- Imad A Syed, Chief Information Officer, PiLog Group
Success stories from partners
PiLog: Material Master Taxonomy 1.0 leverages “Co-Innovated with SAP” service to improve efficiency ...
Co-Innovated with SAP – We can work together to make your product successful
As part of Co-Innovation engagement, we are committed to offer you maximum feasible/possible support to the position your solution in the market but You have to be in the driver’s seat….!!
- Strong Co-Branding under the Co-Innovated with SAP umbrella with exclusivity in the market to offer the solution as Co-Innovated with SAP.
- Listing in SAP App Center enables you to market and deliver your applications, add-in’s, and integration kits to 378,000+ SAP customers worldwide. Get ready to have an increase reach, harness the power of the SAP brand, and scale your business.
- Direct your prospects to the online directory listing of certified solutions, so they can search and find your solution.
- Unique opportunity to showcase the product offerings with a demo to the stakeholders including Product Management, Solution Management colleagues, Field colleagues etc. to bring awareness.
- Joint Positioning at Events and Forums as applicable.
Links to various services/assets from Partner Innovation Lifecycle Service
- SAP Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services – One stop for partners to co-innovate with SAP :
Link to video
- Co-Innovate with SAP for success in the digital economy :
Link to video
- SAP Integration and Certification Center: 20 Years of Service :
Link to video
- Ready to convert your innovative idea(s) into marketable solution(s) :
Co-Innovated with SAP
- Find the right Co-Innovated with SAP or SAP-Certified Solution for your business :
Link to the Certified Solution Directory
- Explore Software Integration Certification Services :
Link
- Explore the SAP Integration Certification Finder :
Link
- Find certified Outsourcing Partners easily :
Link
- Partner Certification to Operate SAP Solutions and SAP Software Environments :
Link
- Explore Hardware Integration Certification Services :
Link
- Find Certified and Supported SAP HANA Hardware :
Link
To get started with
Co-Innovated with SAP service, contact us at
coinnovate@sap.com.