On April 16, 2026, SAP officially opened its newest creative space for customer co-creation, SAP AppHaus Walldorf.
After months of renovation and designing the new creative space together with architects and facility management, the new SAP AppHaus Walldorf opened its doors for SAP employees in the region. It is an important milestone towards an outstanding, integrated customer experience on the Walldorf campus. The opening started with a fireside chat with Álvaro Wiedling, head of Customer Engagement Services MEE; Andreas Wendel, head of SAP Innovation Experience Services; Dennis Kecskemeti, head of SAP Innovation Experience; and moderated by Kathrin Tarnai-Sindl, head of Customer Engagements for APAC, EMEA, and MEE.
Visitors such as Dirk Haeussermann, managing director SAP Germany, joined the event to get first impressions of the new space: “The new SAP AppHaus Walldorf is a very friendly and inviting collaboration space that is a perfect setup for our customers and partners to explore the newest innovations. It inspires them to move on into real, live solutions.”
The opening celebration
For the opening, the SAP AppHaus team decided to not cut a red ribbon, but tell a little story. After uncovering an old Chinese gong, Kecskemeti officially opened the new SAP AppHaus Walldorf with a loud and clear gong stroke. He explained that the gong was one of the signature pieces from the previous creative space in Heidelberg. There, it had a classic, traditional Chinese design and its sound was used during many workshops, meeting breaks, and events. When the team prepared the move from Heidelberg, it was immediately clear that the gong had to be taken to Walldorf. It went through its own small transformation, being redesigned and given a modern look to perfectly fit into the new space. When its deep sound was heard in the new SAP AppHaus Walldorf environment it was a worthy setting to start the new chapter in its new home.
From now on, the gong will be an integral part of SAP AppHaus Walldorf, where the team continues to run innovation workshops. Together with SAP customers and partners, it is all about framing the right business problems, turning insights into blueprints, and piloting ideas fast. This is especially relevant for AI solutions and the business opportunities brought about by agentic AI. Along the dedicated innovation toolkit for AI, the SAP AppHaus team supports customers of all industries to explore use cases and design them based on the latest SAP technologies. That way, SAP customers can learn, adapt, and scale with confidence.
The integrated Walldorf campus experience
Now at SAP headquarters, the new SAP AppHaus Walldorf offers customers a collaborative, hands-on space to explore SAP innovation. Together with the SAP Experience Center, the show floor, S-Factory, and S.Mart Store, SAP’s Walldorf campus takes customers on a truly holistic journey, from inspiration to real impact. It shows visitors not just what SAP can do, but offers them the opportunity to explore and design solutions with the latest SAP technologies, such as SAP Business AI, to use the innovation potential for their respective business. Along its human-centered innovation approach, the SAP AppHaus helps teams turn ideas into solutions and make innovation real, especially when it comes to AI- and agentic AI-infused use cases.
“Our new innovation service offerings represent a significant evolution in how we support our customers’ digital transformation. By combining the inspirational power of our SAP Experience Centers with the interactive, hands-on SAP AppHaus workshop formats, we’re able to guide customers at every stage of their transformation journey and create measurable value quickly,” Wieldling says. “What truly sets this approach apart is our commitment to involving business stakeholders and end users from day one. This helps ensure that the use cases we identify and solutions we design have genuine business relevance and real-world applicability—ultimately delivering outcomes that matter to our customers.”
The work with customers
At the heart of what the SAP AppHaus offers are three core services: innovation service, explore service, and design service. Depending on the customer’s needs, these can be extended, for example, with different workshop formats, such as for SAP Business AI, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), or Joule. In a networked way, customers also get direct access to product experts who are involved where they add the most value.
New beginnings
“For many people, the SAP AppHaus Heidelberg was more than just a workplace or a workshop location. It felt like working in a startup environment to build and design new solutions together with customers and partners. So, there clearly is a nostalgic look back on shared memories,” Tarnai-Sindl says. “At the same time, the campus in Walldorf brings new energy and opportunities. You feel more strongly that you’re part of a bigger whole and have the chance to meet and connect with many colleagues and people more easily. It’s a move from a very familiar environment into a larger context, with a sense of new beginnings.”
The first comments on the guest wall in SAP AppHaus Walldorf seem to prove her right: “Cool new space!”, “Finally!”, and “How inspiring, open, and well designed.”
How is the SAP AppHaus set up to work with customers globally?
The SAP AppHaus Network plays an important scaling role on an international level. It consists of more than 20 SAP partners that work closely with the market units, have established their own SAP AppHaus locations, and are fully trained in the human-centered innovation methodology as well as latest workshop formats, such as the Joule Agent Discovery Workshop also offered in the specialized innovation toolkit for AI. All members are empowered early on with the latest methods, tools, and knowledge, allowing them to act as agile front-runners and co-innovation experts. They support customers regardless of their digital maturity, guiding them to explore new use cases and unlock tangible business value for customers around the world along SAP’s human-centered approach to innovation.
In addition, SAP AppHaus and the SAP Partner organization jointly launched the SAP AppHaus Alliances initiative. It is specifically designed for large SAP Global Strategic Services partners that work with key customers worldwide and are empowered to use the SAP AppHaus AI workshop formats.
Imke Vierjahn is SAP AppHaus Network communications lead.
