The Success of a Physical, Interactive RISE with SAP Workshop

“The RISE with SAP solution is another step towards meeting customers, allowing them to focus not just on IT, but on business.”

Irina Shotova, CEO, NTT DATA Business Solutions Russia

It is not a secret that in emerging countries like the CIS region, cloud solutions for core (ERP) business have not been very popular due to various reasons: starting from a purely psychological dislike to cloud, to ending with security questions and political risks of sanctions.

That is why, when the RISE with SAP offering was announced, the SAP CIS partner team jointly with SAP’s Partner Solution Center immediately decided to run a workshop with key partners to position the advantages of RISE with SAP (as a new cloud offering), and at the same time brainstorm how to accelerate adoption in CIS.

For this purpose, SAP Partner NTT DATA Business Solutions Russia hosted a physical event for key partners in Moscow, and 16 executives from ten partners joined. This interactive workshop consisted of  a combination of enablement and brainstorming, including several SAP experts explaining the value, benefits and reasons of «why» RISE with SAP.

The participants experienced energetic discussions about RISE with SAP qualities, advantages, disadvantages, as well as customer objections which partners face every day, and brainstormed actions to adopt RISE with SAP. Several innovative and interesting ideas came up, such as offering business consulting as a service, etc. as well as important topics to refocus on, e.g. as solution packaging and more.

With several customers in Russia currently not really tempted to innovate, the team came up with interesting proposals showing customers immediate results in their journey to becoming an Intelligent Enterprise and creating the “hunger” to innovate.

The workshop was a true success, resulting in a list of joint actions, which already showed first results: 18 partners have been authorized for RISE with SAP Sell, nine partner authorizations are in process and two RISE packaged solutions are underway.