IDC Study on SAP BTP: Partners Accelerate Innovation

What challenges are SAP customers facing as they attempt to meet today’s uncertain business climate? And why is the ability to accelerate innovation and time to market so critical for SAP customers and partners?

There are correlations between these areas and SAP partners are experiencing benefits through SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which brings together application development, data and analytics, integration, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, optimized for SAP applications.

As part of a January 2022 IDC study: SAP Business Technology Platform and Partner Success: A Foundation for Customer Lifetime Value*, IDC spoke with select SAP partners that were engaged with SAP BTP. The partners communicated seeing a steady rise in customer interest and adoption of SAP BTP.

While SAP BTP benefits customers with an accelerated time to value and increase in agility, SAP partners also revealed that engaging with SAP BTP resulted in longer term customer relationships, which in turn led to more satisfied clients.

Today’s uncertain business climate is making solution time to market and time to value increasingly important, as customers try to keep pace through more frequent changes to their operating models. Whether introducing new services or technologies, or implementing updates to existing business models, customers need to be able to move quickly from idea to execution. They need to stay agile in order to adapt and stay on top of market challenges. Their partner and partner technology must also support that agility. SAP partners participating in the IDC study called this out as a key value of working with SAP BTP, citing the platform’s strength in speeding their time to market.

One way SAP BTP helps customers and partners increase agility is a notable decrease in implementation times. By replacing custom processes with prepackaged content, solution implementations that used to take months have been reduced to days. By reducing development and deployment times, as well as costs, customers are seeing their business needs addressed much sooner, leading to higher satisfaction and partner retention.

Not only are SAP partners able to reduce development and deployment times using SAP BTP pre-packaged content, but they are also able to build out their own repeatable and documented offerings, further accelerating the implementation and integration process for customers or even enhancing existing capabilities of SAP BTP.

SAP partner Rizing, a global systems integrator focused on enterprise asset management, human capital management, and consumer industries solutions, has multiple service packages or accelerators to meet specific customer needs relative to SAP BTP, and five software applications built using SAP BTP that are available on SAP Store.

“Our products are using SAP BTP components as the foundation and then building business content and/or wrapping the SAP BTP components into SaaS solutions,” said Rizing CTO Martin Stenzig, adding that the company is closely aligned with SAP’s product road map and using SAP Store as another channel for serving its solutions up to clients or to SAP sales.

As part of the IDC study, partners cited that working with SAP BTP led to higher customer satisfaction, software and service renewals, and future projects. The “stickiness” of the platform helps partners to develop a lifelong relationship with customers, moving away from a “one-and-done” sales and implementation model to one of continuous improvement for clients, in line with their business’s long-term goals.

These more holistic customer engagements help extend SAP BTP related partner contracts into new areas, enabling an SAP partner’s focus to shift from finding new customers to retaining current customers for life, driving increased customer loyalty and profit. And the longer term monetary benefits can be substantial, as outlined by Harvard Business Review: “Organizations at the top of their industries in Net Promoter Scores or satisfaction rankings for three or more years tend to grow revenue roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.”**

To learn more about how SAP partners are realizing and fostering customer lifetime value through SAP BTP, check out the IDC Success Guide, SAP Business Technology Platform and Partner Success: A Foundation for Customer Lifetime Value. Or explore the results in other formats: