SAP focused on enabling partners to deliver customer value in Southeast Asia

“As 90% of our implementation happens through partners, it becomes pretty important that our partners understand what we are trying to deliver to our customers,” says Deepak Kaushik, Chief Partner Officer for Southeast Asia.

For SAP, the Southeast Asian region represents a unique opportunity for them, given the various needs of organizations. Be it large enterprises or mid-market companies, the hunger to adopt AI is not showing any signs of fatigue. Instead, the demand is only focus on getting the most out of the technology to enhance productivity and efficiency.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Deepak Kaushik, Chief Partner Officer for Southeast Asia, discusses the opportunities in the region as well as the role its partner ecosystem plays in ensuring they remain ahead of the game.

Can you tell us a bit more about SAP’s priorities with partners in Southeast Asia?

I have four priorities for our partners in Southeast Asia. The first priority is focused on accelerating the business right. To me, accelerating the business is all about working collaboratively with our partners and working together in scaling our business.

Second is amplifying innovation. When I talk about amplifying innovation, it is about innovating, co-innovating with our partners and delivering customer value. So use cases can be developed with our partners or they can leverage our invented use cases.

Third is activating transformation. Activating transformation means that whatever SAP is providing, it needs to be delivered. And you can see that around 90% of implementation happens through our partners. It is about adoption and consumption of those solutions for our customers. So, they can get real value of our use cases or whatever solution we are providing to our customers.

The last one is act which means we are enabling partner autonomy and scaling their capabilities. We are ensuring that they are well versed with the technology so that they can deliver end-to-end customer value.

So, these are the four priorities. And use cases becomes part of that. It leads with co-innovation and also making sure that whatever we are providing part of our process, that is also getting delivered.

What are biggest challenges for partners in this region?

In today’s AI world, things are changing pretty fast. We have come up with a strategy to deal with this. The expectation from our partners is that we deliver or enable them regularly so that they are well-versed with the technology. That is the continuous expectation from them. And we ensure that we work with the partners in delivering that.

Because if consultants are not ready, they don't understand our solution. Then it becomes difficult and challenging for them to talk to our customers. As 90% of our implementation happens through partners, it becomes pretty important that our partners understand what we are trying to deliver to our customers. So what’s most importantly is enablement.

With enablement, how are customers looking at the adoption of AI?

SAP is meant for all segments. If you see the industries, we have a lot of customer success stories. For example, with Garuda Food, we have just gone ahead with our business transformation with one of our partners, IBM. And they have delivered customer value on top of end-to-end retail store and ERP transformation they were looking at.

Similarly, with one of our partners, who has also become our customer, they have implemented digital transformation in-house to ensure that they are actually getting real benefit of our solution, and they become brand ambassador of what we are providing.

AI is becoming not only like sought-to requirement, but it is also becoming mandatory. This is because it drives business value to our customers. So, our partners also need to enable themselves and we are seeing a lot of tractions on that.

We have over 400 use cases. And we have three concepts to deliver these to customers. First is embedded use cases or embedded AI. Next is SAP Joule, which our version of an AI Copilot and has a conversational aspect. And third, we are providing some use cases based on customer use cases, which our partners are going away with us.

Also, ROI remains a strong aspect in the whatever investment customers are making. It’s a conversation that definitely comes in. We work with our partners in ensuring the business case that is being developed is driven toward ensuring the customer is getting real value of their investment. And it really depends on partner conversations with our customers, how they are going to drive that value toward and go what customer is expecting. So, ROI is definitely a conversation in all investment whatever our customers are making to our partners.

We want customers to get the real benefit of the investment. For example, let’s say a customer is having some business challenges. For SAP, the customer value means that those challenges are getting addressed by implementing our solutions. That is the sort of aspect that we are seeing, and the customer value is the reflection of that.

After implementing our solution through our partners, customers see that they really have the benefit of their investment.

Hence, we enable our partners in driving these conversations with our customer. But th end objective is driving customer value because if we are enabling our partners to have a conversation with their customer in enabling customer value, then we see a great success.

I personally make sure that our partners understand the importance of delivering or having a value-based conversation rather than cost-based aspect conversation.

what is your hopes then for the region for the rest of the year and going forward? I think I'm looking for future ready partner ecosystem, which is self-autonomous, which is driving innovation and enabling our customer to drive real customer value. That's my vision.

With that said, what’s your hope for SAP’s partner ecosystem for the rest of the year?

I'm looking for a future ready partner ecosystem, which is self-autonomous and is driving innovation and enabling our customer to drive real customer value. That's my vision.

And my theme of scaling together will remain that we work in power of partnership and making sure that we scale together the SAP business with our partners. And I foresee that this will continue, and we'll keep on evolving and growing with our partners.

Lastly, as you're growing with the partners and enabling them and improving them, which areas do you see partners needing help the most and that SAP is also hoping to work on the most with them as well?

It's on scaling on partner autonomy and all about enabling them on end-to-end customer value journey. When I say customer value journey, it is starting from identification of opportunity to pre-sales, to sales aspect, to adoption and consumption and making sure that it is getting real value to our customers. So that will be continuous.

The challenge starts from the identification part but every component of this journey has got its own challenges. So, depending on partner maturity, some are quite strong in certain aspects, some require a lot of help in other aspects. We work depending on the partner’s maturity into certain stage.

We work collaboratively in making sure that we are helping any of the engagement. There's a lot of hand-holding with the partners to make sure they close the deal because it's a win-win situation for both. If the partner wins, they as well as SAP wins as well.

We have multiple programs like pre-sales validation program and ensuring that they are enabled on pre-sales. So, if someone sees a challenge in their pre-sales team is not ready, so we help them in that sort of program. And because we have multiple solutions, some see requirement of pre-sales in AI capabilities, pre-sales in GROW capabilities, so we enable into that. Similarly in sales, we have different program to enable their sales team, how to position a value selling aspect and all that sort of thing. And it varies from solution to solution.