{"id":22467,"date":"2025-02-13T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2025-02-13T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=22467"},"modified":"2025-02-13T12:00:26","modified_gmt":"2025-02-13T11:00:26","slug":"sap-uki-partner-summit-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/sap-uki-partner-summit-2025.html","title":{"rendered":"SAP UKI Partner Summit 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We had a wonderful day at Ascot yesterday. Over 700 Partners and SAP experts attended the #SAPUKIPartnerSummit<\/a>, exploring new ways to collaborate around SAP’s “AI-First, Suite-First” future<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The air was cold, but the welcome warm at the famous Ascot horse racing venue, UK<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Appropriately enough, the event was kicked off by an AI avatar of Celine Cazali (cazali celine)<\/a> SAP UKI’s Chief Partner Officer (thanks to Will Powell<\/a> Will Powell of Deloitte!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Celine Cazali, Chief Partner Officer for SAP UKI, co-presenting with her AI avatar<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Leila Romane<\/a>, SAP UKI Managing Director covered the highlights of the very successful year, with a look forward to the strategy for the next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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SAP UKI Managing Director Leila Romane<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Karl Fahrbach<\/a> covered the latest partner opportunities, notably around GROW with SAP<\/a>, a public cloud solution perfectly adapted for smaller fast-growing organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Karl Fahrback, Chief Partner Officer for SAP<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I got to quiz the crowd on their listening skills, with a bottle of good French Champagne as a prize — congratulations to “Dr Centipede”!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Timo Elliott, Innovation Evangelist for SAP<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Then I discussed with Jonathan Rhodes<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then it was time to let our partners and customers do the talking, with a panel hosted by James Bates<\/a> including Chris Gabriel<\/a> of NTT Data, Rob Wilson<\/a> CTO of Smyths Toys, Jon Curtis<\/a> of Aspen Pumps, and Vivien Boche<\/a> 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Panel hosted by James Bates of SAP<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Rob Wilson of Smyths Toys<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Rob Curtis of Aspen Pumps Group<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chris Gabriel of NTT Data<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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SAP’s Vivien Boche giving a spirited pitch for SAP Build technology<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Vivien Boche talked about the new opportunities for SAP Build, with new resources available for partners<\/a> to start, master, and master their Build journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was followed by a panel featuring Rob Mooney<\/a> of SAP SuccessFactors interviewing IBM’s Hayden Bamber<\/a> and Andrew Davies<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Andrew Davies and Hayden Bamber of SAP, discussing their SAP SuccessFactors project with Rob Mooney<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

After some prizegiving, afternoon sessions featured deep dives into various sectors. I attended the Private Equity session, where SAP’s Kelly Gamble<\/a> hosted experts such as Rahul Shah<\/a> who emphasized the critical role that IT and ERP plays in “buying well”, “fixing and expanding”, and then “selling growth”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The “fly wheel” of successful IT vs the “doom loop” of digital denialism<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I look foward to seeing everybody at another event soon!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The air was cold, but the welcome warm at Ascot<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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We had a wonderful day at Ascot yesterday. Over 700 Partners and SAP experts attended the SAP UKIP artner Summit 2025, exploring new ways to collaborate around SAP’s “AI-First, Suite-First” future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22487,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[1517],"class_list":["post-22467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conferences","tag-sap-ai-partners"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/Celine-Cazali-and-her-avatar-SAP-UKI-Partner-Summit-2025.jpeg?fit=1280%2C720&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-5Qn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22488,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22467\/revisions\/22488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22487"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}