The more than 22,000 incredibly talented people in SAP’s new Cloud Success Services organization have a clear mission reflected in our name – to ensure the success of every customer’s cloud journey by deploying our best capabilities and services. That is who we are, and why we are here.
Cloud
The cloud has become the predominant operating model for IT, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic forced millions of people to work from home and moved key operations and most of daily life online. It caught many businesses off guard and not all companies were equipped with the tools they needed to combat the new challenges. So, for many companies, the pandemic was an accelerator for digital transformation.
At SAP, we know that each customer is on its own unique transformational journey, moving at its own pace, driven by its own needs. Before the pandemic, most businesses had just begun their cloud-migration journeys. Today, the majority of businesses have a defined cloud strategy. However, most of these companies have limited workloads in the cloud.
Companies that understand how digital transformation can support ongoing business processes and drive new sources of competitive differentiation have sped up their digital and cloud transformation. For example, one of our customers, a diversified energy company, was able to significantly boost operating efficiency during the pandemic. The company’s Executive Board decided to halt several initiatives but went ahead with digital transformation because it produced the greatest value. Now the company’s transformational actions and the use of real-time data to inform decision making is what sets it apart in an industry where production planning is a complex process involving numerous organizations, historic data collection, and an intricate process due to uncertain conditions.
Our job in SAP’s Cloud Success Services organization is to assist businesses transition fully to the cloud. As most companies have realized during the pandemic, the beauty of the cloud is that it untethers businesses and their workforces from physical devices and places. Now is also the time to rethink our direction as a society, and to heed the call from consumers for more sustainable practices. In other words, it is our time to be bold, future focused, and unified, and to become — and remain — a trusted partner for our customers’ success.
Success
Ensuring the success of our customers on the transformation journey requires a balance between functional needs and technological expertise.
For us at SAP, customer success covers every step of the digital transformation journey — from the initial investment in our solutions and services through onboarding, adoption, and consumption and then the expansion of solution reach, ensuring value realization. In doing so, we support customers as they run, transform, and disrupt their businesses.
To achieve this transformational role, we are deploying a new portfolio of services focused on adoption and consumption. We also bring in our partners as we work together to accelerate time-to-value, providing choice and expertise for our customers.
Services
For the last five decades, the SAP Services organization has been instrumental in supporting customers in transforming their processes and in adoption of new technologies. We are expanding this expertise to serve the needs of today. As a service organization, we build deep relationships with our customers, drawing on the vast talent and unmatched capabilities of our team.
Having more than 22,000 people dedicated to our customers’ success makes us uniquely suited to unlocking value for our customers, and I am deeply honored to be leading this new organization.
We engage and align our talent to be where our customers need us most so they can run successfully in the cloud. Our services begin with a single point of contact, either person or team, responsible not only for safeguarding the customer’s investment but also to ensure its value expands through our dedicated engagement and standardized service portfolio of readily available packaged solutions for the full-cloud era.
Our service centers in support of our regional teams are dedicated to enhancing customer lifetime value of their SAP investments by driving scale, automation, and services together with our partners. We know different customer requirements require different engagement types, as does the partner ecosystem.
I am so excited for what lies ahead for our customers, our partners, and our entire team. We are focusing our organization on what is most important to our customers: realizing value while advancing the digital transformation and cloud journey. Our work has only just begun.
Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP.