Recently I had the chance to meet with our Services Board of Advisors, which is comprised of about 20 of our large international customers who meet with us periodically and provide feedback on our strategy, as well as candid insight on what they need from us. There was a tremendous amount of information shared, but I took away a few key themes that are worth sharing:
- Good news … they support our strategy and our direction and are eager to see us accelerate our execution!
- They value our industry expertise. It’s not enough for us to be experts on our solutions or methodology … they want consultants who talk in their terms about their challenges, and help them to address their business objectives.
- They like our new delivery approach. I presented outcome-based services, and they support our direction to lower TCI and TCO with A2O, and leverage pre-assembled content from RDS’s and engineered services, deployed on HEC … all to accelerate implementations and reduce risk. In fact, they want our partners to adopt the same methods!
- They want our guidance. We need to lead our customers on their journey to Cloud, HANA, Big Data, Mobile, etc. They want us to help them build roadmaps, and guide them to most effectively realize the value of their SAP solutions.
I felt energized by the event, and grateful to have the opportunity to hear such candid, specific, and meaningful input from these highy experienced cusotmers.
