Last week’s Summit was an eye-opener for me. I’ve always believed that this team and its partners are in a unique position to improve lives worldwide. Feeling the creativity and energy that percolated through the halls made abstract terms like co-innovation and partner enablement seem very, very real. I saw steadfast commitment evolve into outright passion before my eyes, and I know those in attendance saw it too. That passion is an unstoppable competitive wedge, and it was something that we could only nurture face-to-face.
We’re all facing intensified sales pressure amidst the perennially slow sales cycles seen in Public Services & Healthcare. We will all need help. Tools like Planet Public – and the passion of your colleagues and partners – are going to be essential. The Summit was an early milepost on that journey.
I want to reiterate Simon Paris’ request that you pay it forward. We had a great turnout of 650 people, but we need every SAPer who attended to share key elements of this unique experience with at least 3 colleagues. Please invest 30 or 60 minutes to share the content and relationships you have built with your colleagues at home. Make sure they know we’ve got a ramped-up approach to field enablement that includes money on the table – the Field Enablement Fund. Martin Klein has all the details.
This SAP team and its partners are more than ready to take on the new challenges of the Industry Cloud. Let’s use the rapid change we’re experiencing in the market and in our own company to challenge old assumptions. You are empowered to be creative and to take calculated risks in simplifying life for our Public Services & Healthcare customers and the citizens, students and patients they serve. It’s not just about providing simplicity for customers – it’s also about providing internal simplicity to ensure that we can serve our customers. We need to make our own lives easier to do the same for those we serve.
We’ve been asked to simplify everything so we can do anything. Choosing to simplify will free up resources so we can co-innovate with customers and partners (the lines between the two are blurring). And this is critical. SAP is a cloud company and a platform company. And we’re open to anyone who wants to innovate on our platform. We’ll go one better and co-innovate with anyone who isn’t a direct competitor. So in addition to spreading the word about we learned at the Summit in our ecosystem, be sure to keep your eyes and ears open for co-innovation opportunities in other quarters.
As we turn to that task, I want to offer a final thank you to Peg Kates, Liz McGowan, the entire event production team, and participants from 54 countries who made the Summit such a success. We blew past the other industries on several key event metrics, including meeting our pipeline goals and adoption of the event mobile app. We’re just getting started.
