Prior to the upcoming SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Orlando (June 3-5, 2014), I had the chance to catch up with Augusto Abbarchi on some support-related topics.
Augusto Abbarchi is Senior Vice President, Global Maintenance Go-To-Market for SAP supporting the company in protecting the installed base and in strengthening the way forward to become the #1 Cloud company.
In his role, Augusto and his organization focus on enabling SAP customers to run better by maximizing the value and innovation they drive from our support portfolio.
Being with SAP for more than 15 years, what still motivates you to be successful?
I’m pretty much inspired and motivated by challenges! Both business and human. What we are living now is a moment of deep transformation that requires more than ever a leadership culture and business results. A balanced approach for making SAP the Cloud company and in inspiring our employees. This is a wonderful challenge that is at the same time difficult and exciting.
What is the core mission of SAP’s Maintenance Go-To-Market team?
Our core mission is related to making sure SAP support offerings are perceived and appreciated by the market so that we can drive customer satisfaction and help ensure our customers are taking advantage of the latest SAP innovations through SAP support.
To do this Maintenance Go-To-Market is now changing roles. We are moving from Value OF Maintenance (reactive/proactive protection, enhancements, etc.) to Value FOR Maintenance (business value from using maintained software). In the market today customers want to understand the value they can get from our support offerings and see the direct connection with their way of doing business. This involves a change of approach and an organizational transformation to operate in a completely new way.
This is important because it is exactly the approach required in the Cloud market where expectations of customers are focused on a partnership based on Value Realization.
What are you passionate about?
Well if we really speak about something personal, I’m passionate about Neuroscience and Behavioral Science. I like to understand the essence of our thoughts. This has a lot of implications in our daily work.
Change management is for example one of the most complex exercises for a manager, but it’s also the most interesting. It’s very natural to be scared by change, by anything unknown. This comes from our evolution.
I remember I had read once that human beings living today are a selection of 2 types of individuals. Several million years ago when meeting a strange animal (like a saber-toothed tiger) some individuals would have reacted asking themselves: “is this a danger or not for me?”. Other individuals would have been scared and would have run immediately. Well the former (those that were losing time asking themselves the question) are now extinct…, while those that were running have survived. So now every human being when meeting something unknown is automatically scared and tends to run away from it.
For this reason, managing change means helping the people to be part of this change and not in trying to change them – driving them to feel comfortable while moving to the next step without any fear. This means we sometimes must adapt the change to the people and not the people to the change. This can be difficult to accept for a leader, but it’s the essence of management.
Sorry for the digression, maybe we must speak business here :wink:
How important is the SAP ONE Support program from an overall SAP perspective?
SAP ONE Support is a milestone in SAP support history and represents a key factor for driving the transition of our customer base to the Cloud.
It is simply what customers need and what they are now looking for. Every customer is evaluating how and when they should transition to the Cloud, but they have different constraints and different needs. They want to move to the Cloud at their own pace and want to focus more effectively on the business processes that drive business value – rather than the mechanics of the underlying technology.
For this reason they expect consistent and seamless support to business processes irrespective of how they are deployed – in the Cloud, on-premise or in hybrid scenarios. With SAP ONE Support no matter what the deployment option is, customers will have one single interface and end-to-end support on the whole landscape. Through this program we aim to create what we call an “Integrated Support Experience” – harmonizing support offerings and dramatically reducing complexity for the customers.
SAP ONE Support is automatically available through the SAP Enterprise Support offering while the premium support engagements (SAP MaxAttention and SAP ActiveEmbedded) will continue to be key for those customers that have custom and higher support needs.
Can we expect to learn more about this new program at the upcoming SAPPHIRE NOW event?
Absolutely, there will be an SAP ONE Support Center located on the SAPPHIRE NOW showfloor. Visitors will have the chance to receive first-hand information from our SAP experts including myself – via 1on1 talks at our meeting tables or by attending one of the 30+ demo theater sessions. In particular, our booth will also feature the following SAP ONE Support live demos:
- BI Monitoring, System Monitoring, and Guided Procedures for SAP HANA
- End User Experience Monitoring and End-to-End Trace Analysis for SuccessFactors
- Exception Management and Integration Monitoring for SAP HANA Cloud Integration
- Message Flow Monitoring for SAP Process Integration and Ariba Network
- Quality Gate Management for SAP HANA
- System Monitoring and End-to-End Trace Analysis for SAP hybris
Just stop by at the SAP ONE Support Center to directly experience SAP support!
Find all blogs related to this topic here. Learn more about the SAP support presence at SAPPHIRE NOW here.
Stay in the conversation by following SAP Software Support & Maintenance on SCN.
Follow along throughout the event on Twitter at @SAPSupportCE and @SAPPHIRENOW.
Benjamin Wilk is part of SAP’s global Maintenance Go-To-Market organization and acts as social media ambassador for SAP Support.
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