Becoming an SF Partner (Not)

[Former Member]

Do you ever have those days where you feel frustrated and ignored? Well sitting here today, I thought to myself, get it off your chest. Maybe I will feel better, maybe not, but at least I will have released some frustration by putting my thoughts into words.

The company I work for is an SAP Services Partner, specializing in HCM, mainly the basics of HR and experts (don’t really like using that word) in Australian payroll. We are not large and don’t have many clients but we are good at what we deliver and I believe our clients would agree with that. Geographically we only service a small area of Australia but when an opportunity presents itself outside of our “normal” area we will pursue it. Recently we established an AMS service and have one satisfied customer and are actively pursuing our second.

So when SAP purchased SuccessFactors (SF) we thought this would be an opportunity for our company to become engaged and open a new line of business that seemed to be in line with our present skills and knowledge. It would also allow us to engage with clients outside our area as SF tended to allow for remote work. This would fit within our AMS strategy. To the best of our knowledge there were few, if any, existing SF partners within Australia and so we headed off to an SF demo, together with a couple of other SAP HCM capable partners.

Liking what we saw (especially Australia being one of ten countries to have payroll in the cloud) we expressed interest in Employee Central and Payroll. The “bread and butter” of our existence. Surely we would be made partners and the successes would come for ourselves and SF.

After several emails and meetings we progressed no further. We were told:

“we have key relationships in place already and have decided to put on hold any further plans to recruit additional partners, beyond the discussions already in play with global partners.  This is due to resource constraints locally and our ability to fully support the enablement and ramp up phases for new partners.”

Unfortunately for our company some of the other SAP HCM partners in our area have been given partnership status and are well on the road to being successful SF implementers, whilst we await the call up at some time in the future (possibly?). Probably our size held us back, also our restricted area of operation maybe, but we believe we could have added real value and we may never know.

These thoughts are my own and may or may not reflect the thoughts of the organisation I work for but I do feel a little better now. I welcome any comments/thoughts/experiences others may have.