SAP is deeply committed to helping our OEM partners become successful. Over the last few years, the SAP OEM leadership team has invested in programs, procedures and organizations to ensure our partners’ success.
One of the biggest investments SAP has made is the Partner Engineering “A-Team”. This team is comprised of seasoned, top notch, hands-on SAP architects who span the globe. Each member has a very advanced set of skills with a concentration in HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, Analytics, etc. They have deep development and consulting backgrounds and have worked on some of the most innovative and bleeding edge projects.
The mission of the A-Team is made up of two major initiatives:
- Technical Architecture Services
- Product Readiness
Under the Technical Architecture Services initiative, the A-Team provides post sales, high touch, technical architecture services to key partners. The services can be anything from Architectural guidance and mentorship from inception to delivery, to HANA Re-platforming, to Various Point Services (Performance and Tuning, Architecture Review, Product use related help, etc). The intent is to not use them as an extension to the partner’s development team, but rather to eliminate any potential roadblocks that may come up in the development phase. By doing so, they are able to speed up the partner’s and SAP’s time to revenue.
Under the Product Readiness initiative, the A-Team solicits feedback from OEM partners on features and changes needed to make our products more applicable to the OEM channel and make the partner’s lives easier. It is a great opportunity for partners to have their voices heard by the various product management teams. This also benefits the product teams to hear this valuable feedback so they can plan and incorporate the feedback into the future of their solutions.
Each of SAP’s key partners is set up with a designated Success Manager who is responsible for the daily business and GTM activities. While they are responsible for all aspects of the relationship (Build, Engage, Promote, Sell), I work closely with them and the partner focusing on the Build phase. My role as the Technical Relationship Manager has me working as a liaison between the OEM partner and the A-Team, Product Management and other specialized teams on a daily basis. I bring all of these teams together to help ensure the technical success of the partner. My partners include most of the largest Global Strategic Services Partners (GSSP) accounts worldwide as well as some of the largest High Tech Accounts. These partners are typically extremely advanced in the use of our products and solutions. The requests for assistance that we get typically require an in-depth knowledge that generally would not be found outside of the development organization. I am truly fortunate to have this group standing together with me to ensure the partner’s success.
I truly believe that the investments that SAP leadership has made into programs and organizations like this is the path to the success of next generation partnerships. Many of the partners that have been able to take advantage of this program have already shown an incredibly short time to revenue and increased quality of their products in the market due to the advanced technical services that this team provides.
If you would like to learn more about the OEM program or the A-Team, please drop me an email. My address can be found in my profile.
Michael W. Shea
