SAP launches new partner initiatives

SAP has launched new resources for its channel partners as the company looks to change how it works with its partners.

The vendor launched new partner initiatives - a partner delivery quality framework, free access to software demos, enhancements to the SAP App Center and the SAP Endorsed Apps initiative.

SAP chief partner officer Karl Fahrbach told CRN that the vendor will place partners at the centre of a customer’s lifecycle.

“If you look at the way we looked at partners in the past, it was basically from a go-to-market perspective, like resellers and other partners that help us expand our market reach and from an implementation perspective,” he said.

“To make customers successful, we need to look at the customer lifecycle, and within that partners would play a role in each of those steps.”

The partner delivery quality framework is a set of standard processes, tools and reporting aids to help partners train and enable their delivery resources and monitor quality across projects. Partners can also score grants for consultant education and incentives for partner investments.

SAP will also provide partners with free access to an integrated, preconfigured software demonstration environment to showcase SAP products to customers, featuring intelligent
enterprise demonstration scenarios covering a wide range of integrated solutions and embedded intelligence technologies. More scenarios will be added over time.

Partners also get 12 months of free access to test and demo systems on SAP S/4HANA Cloud starting 1 July 2020.

The SAP App Center, which holds some 1500 partner solutions across the company’s product lines, has been revamped with updates to the overall user experience to help find solutions they need based on the SAP product they want to extend, the certification level, the publisher and the type of solution.

The App Center will also get partner offerings with pre-built content for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud and allow enterprises to extend, deploy and use it quickly and easily.

Finally the SAP Endorsed Apps initiative, placed within the partner delivery quality framework, is a new way for growing partners to showcase their innovations on the App Center via an invitation-only process.