Unlocking Asia’s potential through partnership territories
As the old saying goes:
“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
In today’s fast-paced, technology-dominated global market, cloud computing and AI have opened up new opportunities for companies to optimize productivity and operations – which would you choose? Go fast or go far?
What if you don’t have to decide? What if I told you that you could go fast, And also get far?
How?
As technology providers in regions such as Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) compete to expand their solution offerings with the latest and greatest solutions – particularly in the area of generative AI technology – it is becoming increasingly difficult for individual vendors to offer complete solutions that cover all requirements.
That’s why at SAP we have strengthened our partner strategy. With the increasing demand for cloud-based innovation, our dynamic partner ecosystem is becoming increasingly important to deliver tailored value to each customer. Today, SAP has over 25,000 partners worldwide in 140 countries, including nearly 5,000 in the APJ region. We are now living in a new era where our channel partners are driving technology adoption.
Unleashing growth in APJ.
The Asia Pacific landscape is far from homogeneous. While it is culturally and linguistically diverse, it is also home to a significant community of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which account for over 96%¹ of all businesses in Asia.
SAP has a long history of working with midsize companies to help them achieve their goals. Over 250,000 growing companies worldwide rely on SAP to help them move forward, and around 80% of our customers are small and midsize businesses. While midsize companies are the growth engines of the future, SAP recognizes that they face many of the same business constraints as their larger competitors.
Mid-market leaders need flexible, agile tools that enable scalability without increasing cost and complexity. They need solutions that help them connect, grow and innovate their businesses today and be prepared for whatever comes next.
That is why SAP introduced a new offering for midsize customers in March 2023: GROW with SAP – a ready-to-use cloud ERP solution based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. As a company that already supports the largest companies in the world, we at SAP know what it takes to help customers realize the benefits of cloud solutions. Building on our success with the RISE with SAP offering, we are now transferring these industry best practices and our extensive expertise to help midsize companies realize the added value of adopting cloud ERP.
This is how we help you to be faster.
The GROW with SAP offer includes services and tools that optimize project execution at a fixed price, as well as the possibility of technical go-lives in after just four to six weeksMid-sized companies can now enjoy rapid time to value and the benefits of a right-sized cloud ERP solution – all at a predictable cost.
And that’s how we help you get far.
GROW with SAP customers also gain access to a global ecosystem of local, knowledgeable partners and free learning resources designed to help them achieve meaningful business outcomes. Standards-compliant configurations enable our customers to minimize technical customizations, enabling them to run fast; and add modular business applications enabled by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) one priority at a time to run far – keep pace with the speed of their innovation without sacrificing scalability as the company grows.
We bring support closer to you.
For over 50 years, SAP has helped companies of all sizes do their best work, and we continue to do so with a clear goal of delivering long-term value to our customers.
Not only has SAP exponentially expanded our partner ecosystem, we have also introduced new programs, initiatives and frameworks that are revolutionizing the way we operate and innovate with our partners.
We recently launched a new Partner-led territories (PLT) Initiative that prioritizes certain territories – such as a solution area, industry, or geographic area – to carefully selected partners who meet SAP’s criteria. The initiative grants these partners maximum autonomy in these territories while bringing consulting and technical support closer to customers. In APJ, the PLT initiative has been rolled out with our partners in selected market segments – particularly SME-focused ones – in Australia, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and emerging markets such as Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Maldives, and Nepal. As the initiative matures, we are also constantly applying best practices to prepare for a full rollout in additional APJ markets such as Japan and South Korea.
The feedback has been very positive. At one of the launch events last quarter in Goa, India, a customer shared his excitement with me: “I never thought that growing companies like ours would also be able to access SAP’s world-class solutions to grow our business – it always seemed a little out of reach to me. I am so excited that we can now discuss our business requirements with a local partner and also benefit from such cutting-edge technologies.”
The path ahead of us.
According to a survey by Forbes Insight², 88% of SME business leaders in Asia Pacific plan to expand their international customer base in the next three years. With the growing ambitions of mid-sized companies in the APJ region, SAP partners are becoming a new key factor for cross-border growth.
At the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando this year, SAP announced an unprecedented number of strategic AI partnerships with global leaders – including AWS, IBM, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, NVIDIA and others. This will infuse our entire enterprise cloud portfolio with business AI and equip SAP BTP with the broadest set of Large Language Models (LLM) to help customers adopt AI faster.
It has never been more exciting to be part of the SAP partner ecosystem and the mid-market business. The pace of innovation in this space is simply exhilarating.
We know that transforming a business is a journey, not a destination. To help customers find the right expertise, SAP is continuously evolving our partner training and validation programs. In addition to the competency framework, we recently launched a new RISE certification with SAP Validated Partner to help customers find their ideal cloud transformation partner with greater confidence.
To find an SAP partner, start here.
You can find partner solutions in the SAP Store.
To learn more about partnership opportunities with SAP, visit us here.
