A Complete Portfolio is Critical in a Perfect Storm of Innovation

You and your fellow solution providers have one objective in common: delivering value to customers. How you do this in the months and years ahead however, will likely change profoundly—if it hasn’t already.

A perfect storm of technology-driven innovation is reshaping the way the world runs. The emergence of cloud, mobile and Big Data, among others, is fundamentally changing how people work, how we communicate, and how businesses sell to consumers. Enterprises, no matter how big or small, are evolving with fewer geographical boundaries, more mobile workers, significant volumes of data and real-time information needs.

What’s exciting is that past limitations now can be overcome through unprecedented innovations. For example, it wasn’t long ago when the notion of BYOD would have been laughed off the CIO table. And who would have thought that line-of-business leaders actually would drive technology decisions to the extent they do now?

Software, consequently, is viewed more as a service than a product. Users want to see that “service” evolve and scale with them as their needs change. Solution provider reputations will be molded or destroyed based on how well they address the storm that now swirls through our industry. Here are the five categories behind this seismic shift:

• Applications
• Analytics
• Cloud
• Database & Technology
• Mobile

Myths abound regarding all of these areas, which may seem disparate at first. While specialization is a strength, the reality is that the more you can harness the power of integration across these technologies, the more value you will ultimately represent to the customer.

You don’t have to do it alone. Partner with a vendor that can offer innovations across the spectrum in consumable, packaged solutions tailored to specific industries—a vendor that makes it easy for you to expand your offerings, providing solutions with tight integration of these technologies. And make sure that vendor has a strong ecosystem of partners that will collaborate with you on the areas you don’t specialize in, to bring full value to your customers.

You could opt to wait it out—see what unfolds over time and essentially watch competitors gain an insurmountable lead as the perfect storm rolls ahead. A safer bet, though, is to ride it and steer the greater overall value to your customers.

This forecast is abundantly clear. Make sure your plan takes all of the five “storm factors” into account.

About SAP


With 12 quarters of double-digit growth, SAP is not just about providing ERP to large enterprises; we offer partners a complete portfolio of solutions across five market categories: analytics, cloud, mobile, applications and database & technology, all powered by SAP HANA, our powerful in-memory solution. More than 80 percent of our customers are small and midsize businesses, and our solutions are made to address the challenges of these customers across 24 industries. Partners enjoy great benefits from our award-winning SAP PartnerEdge program including partner enablement, generous MDF and more.

Learn more about partnership opportunities at: http://www.sappartneredge.com/portfolio.

Ira Simon is vice president, Partner Marketing at 
SAP. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of The VAR Guy’s annual sponsorship.