Yesterday we had a wonderful day at Ascot. More than 700 SAP partners and experts attended the #SAPUKIPartnerSummit, exploring new ways to collaborate around the future of SAP “AI-First, Suite-First”.
As expected, the event was started by an AI avatar of Celine Cazali (celine cazali), Partner Director at SAP UKI (thanks to Will Powell, Deloitte’s Will Powell!).
Leila Romane, CEO of SAP UKI, covered the highlights of such a successful year and is looking forward to the strategy for next year.
Karl Fahrbach covered the latest opportunities for partners, particularly around GROW with SAP, a public cloud solution perfectly suited for smaller, fast-growing organizations.
I was able to quiz the crowd on their listening skills, with a bottle of fine French champagne as a reward. Congratulations to “Dr. Centipede”!
I then spoke with Jonathan Rhodes, director of product marketing at SAP Cloud ERP, about how we can work across the ecosystem to overcome the remaining barriers for organizations migrating to the latest cloud architectures and leveraging the latest AI technologies.
Then it was time to let our partners and customers speak, with a panel hosted by James Bates that included Chris Gabriel from NTT Data, Rob Wilson CTO from Smyths Toys, Jon Curtis from Aspen Pumps and Vivien Boche from SAP. It included some candid discussions about the role of digital transformation, with an emphasis that, at the end of the day, it’s not the technology (or the move to the cloud) that counts: it’s the hard work of rethinking business processes!
Rob Curtis and Chris Gabriel talked about various uses of AI across the group and helped with some easy-to-use extensions to NTT data, based on SAP Business Technology Platform.
Vivien Boche spoke about 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 where Rob Mooney from SAP SuccessFactors interviewed Hayden Bamber and Andrew Davies from IBM and they discussed the lessons learned during the successful implementation of SuccessFactors at IBM. They emphasized that having adopted the technology themselves gave them a lot of extra credibility when talking to potential prospects.
After some awards presentations, the afternoon sessions included deep dives into various sectors. I attended the Private Equity session, where SAP’s Kelly Gamble hosted experts like Rahul Shah, who emphasized the critical role IT and ERP play in “buying right,” “fixing and expanding,” and then “selling growth.”
Rahul explained the critical role of establishing a good IT foundation in taking an undervalued company to the next level, contrasting the “flywheel” of better insights leading to better management and new opportunities with the “fatal loop” of “digital denial.”
And, of course, there was plenty of time reserved for the most important part of the conference: lots of networking among participants. The most important technology in our industry is… people!
I hope to see you all at another event soon!
