Pushing Software to its Limits

One of the most rewarding aspects of product development is taking a new innovation, revving it to the max, and putting it through its paces with a crack squad of ecosystem partner experts. And this all happens in the course of an SAP Business Information Technology (BIT) partner test.  Your typical partner test is a three-day, pre-release, software test session, hosted onsite at an SAP location, facilitated and supervised by very experienced SAP developers, and delivered free to the participating partner testers.

This is one of the ways we help to smooth out any remaining rough edges, further enrich BIT solutions, and ensure that ecosystem partners are totally immersed in product knowledge. It’s also vital as a mechanism to fully bake market expectations and customer requirements into each solution. Even though we gather SAP customer requirements during innovation and development life-cycles, by bringing in partners we augment our understanding of our own customers’ wants and needs with additional feedback from eco partners advocating on behalf of their installed base. In doing this, we also create a vast global team with deep knowledge about upcoming analytics, mobile, and portal releases – covering the spectrum of technology offerings from SAP BIT. Believe me, the solutions are thoroughly dissected during these intensive workshops.

Apart from intrinsic market-readiness benefits and enhanced quality assurance, these test sessions also prepare partners to train their consultants, showing them what’s on the immediate horizon with each new product. This ultimately helps to reduce their customers’ total cost of implementation and ownership. And last, but not least, the test sessions equip partners to create software extensions of their own, using SAP software development kits (SDKs), in order to expand the capabilities of our new technology and crucially to further meet their customers’ needs.

Take a look at this short archive video to get a better impression of what BIT partner tests are all about.

So with that said, I want to spread the word about several partner test sessions scheduled over the next few months. Now, they will be free of charge and they will be held onsite at multiple SAP locations around the world, but beware they do require a minimum level of know-how and previous experience with SAP software. We have to set the bar high to ensure that participants will absorb sufficient expertise to profit their customers. After all, if you had a supercharged Ferrari at the track, you’d want to be suitably equipped to take those corners as fast as possible and really give it full throttle. Similarly, software test drivers should be budding Vettels or Hamiltons eager to push products to the edge and use their influence to keep their customers in pole position.

So if you’re an SAP BIT partner with the essential prerequisite skills and feel qualified to join, please click on the appropriate session from the list below and get in touch with us.

Upcoming SAP Business Information Technology (BIT) Partner Tests

(click each link below for further detail and information on how to take part)

MARCH 2014

APRIL 2014

Further reading

• See also: Welcome to the BIT Partner Beta Test Portal (on SAP Service Marketplace)

Oliver Schilling manages the SAP BIT Innovation Network.