We had a wonderful day at Ascot yesterday. Over 700 Partners and SAP experts attended the #SAPUKIPartnerSummit, exploring new ways to collaborate around SAP’s “AI-First, Suite-First” future.
Appropriately enough, the event was kicked off by an AI avatar of Celine Cazali (cazali celine) SAP UKI’s Chief Partner Officer (thanks to Will Powell Will Powell of Deloitte!).
Leila Romane, SAP UKI Managing Director covered the highlights of the very successful year, with a look forward to the strategy for the next year.
Karl Fahrbach covered the latest partner opportunities, notably around GROW with SAP, a public cloud solution perfectly adapted for smaller fast-growing organizations.
I got to quiz the crowd on their listening skills, with a bottle of good French Champagne as a prize — congratulations to “Dr Centipede”!
Then I discussed with Jonathan Rhodes Head of Product Marketing for SAP Cloud ERP how we can work across the ecosystem to overcome remaining barriers for organizations moving to the latest cloud architectures and taking advantage of the latest AI technologies.
Then it was time to let our partners and customers do the talking, with a panel hosted by James Bates including Chris Gabriel of NTT Data, Rob Wilson CTO of Smyths Toys, Jon Curtis of Aspen Pumps, and Vivien Boche of SAP. It included some candid discussions of the role of digital transformation, with an emphasis that at the end of the day, it’s not the technology (or moving to the cloud) that counts: it’s the hard work of rethinking the business processes!
Rob Curtis and Chris Gabriel talked about various uses of AI across the group, helped with some easy-to-use extensions from NTT data, built on the SAP Business Technology Platform
Vivien Boche talked about the new opportunities for SAP Build, with new resources available for partners to start, master, and master their Build journey.
This was followed by a panel featuring Rob Mooney of SAP SuccessFactors interviewing IBM’s Hayden Bamber and Andrew Davies talking about the lessons learned during their successful rollout of SuccessFactors at IBM. They emphasized that having adopted the technology themselves gave a lot of extra credibility when it came to talking to potential prospects.
After some prizegiving, afternoon sessions featured deep dives into various sectors. I attended the Private Equity session, where SAP’s Kelly Gamble hosted experts such as Rahul Shah who emphasized the critical role that IT and ERP plays in “buying well”, “fixing and expanding”, and then “selling growth”.
Rahul explained the critical role that establishing a good IT foundation has in taking an undervalued company to the next level, contrasting the “fly wheel” of better insights leading to better management and new opportunities with the “doom loop” of “digital denial”.
And of course there was plenty of time reserved for the most important part of the conference: lots of networking between participants. The most important technology in our industry is… people!
I look foward to seeing everybody at another event soon!
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