SAP’s Industry Cloud: Let’s talk value with SAP partner Vistex

Sanjay Shah can offer up any number of reasons why Vistex uses SAP’s industry cloud. But foremost, he says, is the industry cloud’s ability to deliver “faster time to value” for SAP’s customers across many industries.

“The industry cloud allows us to deploy and provision rapidly, and also implement rapidly for SAP customers,” says Vistex’s founder, CEO, and chief architect. “Historically, business applications have taken longer to deploy. The way SAP’s industry cloud is architected around the SAP Business Technology Platform, it gives us the ability to provision this very, very rapidly.”

How rapidly?

“We believe it should be at least 2X to 3X faster than what we have been able to do historically in the on-prem environment,” Shah says.

Sales Solutions by Vistex  help customers price their products and services, develop and execute incentive programs, and drive revenue. The Chicago-area company was SAP’s first Solution Extension Partner in 2006. Vistex was again at the vanguard by developing with SAP’s industry cloud when it was first introduced in 2020.

The new Sales Solutions by Vistex emerged from an existing Vistex software portfolio that has evolved and grown since Shah founded the company in 1999. These solutions – SAP Channel Program Management by Vistex, SAP Extended Price Management by Vistex, SAP Rights and Royalty Management by Vistex, and SAP Vendor Program Management by Vistex,  – focus on complex pricing, rebates, incentives, and rights and royalties with the goal of managing growth, revenue, and cost control programs to increase profitability. With these solutions, enterprise organizations can better plan, execute and analyze the effectiveness of their go-to-market programs.

Vistex supports SAP clients across a wide range of industries, and all of them face challenges borne of the same underlying forces of digitalization, Shah says.

“Whether it’s consumer products, or media and entertainment, or retail, or wholesale distribution, I think all industries are undergoing rapid transformation,” Shah says. “And digital transformation is not limited to a few industries. It’s everywhere. It’s all-pervasive.”

Vistex’s and SAP industry cloud’s ability to rapidly innovate and update solutions can help customers keep pace, he adds.

“One of the key benefits of this approach with industry cloud is that it allows us to always be current with our software,” Shah says. “This is a huge advantage for SAP customers, who don’t have to deal with the hassle of upgrades, etc. It’s a continuous-innovation, a continuous-delivery mechanism.”

The chief concern Shah hears from potential industry cloud customers is security with respect to critical corporate data. Data security always has been – and always will be – a top priority of Vistex and SAP, he says. That, he says, and “are we going to be able to provide the potential that we have outlined and that we have promised?”

“We urge SAP customers and prospects to take a look at what we have, and I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised by the level of sophistication, the robustness, and the coverage that we have to support their mission-critical processes as their business models rapidly change and evolve,” Shah says.