SAP Global Partner Summit 2015: 'Value Drives Volume'

With more than 800 partners in attendance at SAP’s Global Partner Summit, the ERP company’s president of Global Partner Operations, Rodolpho Cardenuto, wrapped the conversation of the day around the company’s mantra: partners first, simple wins and deliver value.

Being held in Orlando, Florida at the Hilton Orlando Resort, the summit, which has nearly doubled in size since 2013, did its best to echo the concept of simplicity — a company-wide initiative that SAP CEO Bill McDermott harped on during his keynote address last year at SAP Sapphire Now. In response to this goal, Cardenuto told channel partners in the audience this year that SAP believes “complexity is the enemy.”

SAP wants to remove complexity from the table by following an agenda designed to provide a simple go-to-market strategy (which will focus on SAP PartnerEdge and partner licenses), a simple business model (which will revolve around Partner Select, a redesign of OEM and PMC, and its HCP Innovation Plan); and a simple portfolio (which will leverage SAP SME Solutions powered by SAP Hana and SAP Anywhere) to more than 13,000 of its partners worldwide.

Cardenuto, who has been in his current role for a little over a year now, also promised to be more aware of how fast partners make money on SAP solutions. According to him, SAP’s 2015 agenda for partners, noted briefly above, centers around immediate return on investment (ROI) instead of faster ROI.

He also stressed SAP’s commitment to assisting partners with leveraging SAP’s portfolio for their own needs. “We want our partners to run and use our software without any barriers,” Cardenuto said. “We are eliminating all the barriers for you to run SAP.”

For Q3, he pointed out that SAP Partner Edge, the company’s central program for partners, will bring value creation; attractive discounts; SAP portfolio opportunity; robust training and enablement; and simple program architecture.

Additionally, Cardenuto introduced SAP Anywhere, a new front-office suite for small and medium businesses (SMBs). At the moment, the new solution, which enables companies to manage sales, marketing, e-commerce and inventory activities under one umbrella, will be initially be rolled out in China, with the help of China Telecom — a Chinese state-owned telecommunication company. SAP Anywhere is intended to be provided as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution run by SAP.

Cardenuto ended his keynote by reiterating the company’s strategy behind increasing its customer base through its partners: “We believe that value drives volume.”

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