This blog is a follow-on to the blog Partners reach your target audience better with SAP API Business Hub in the meanwhile we renamed the SAP API Business Hub to SAP Business Accelerator Hub.
In this blog i will present the impact of business accelerators in the partner ecosystem.
Business Accelerators and Partners
Introducing the elephant: Do business accelerators hurt partner business? SAP Business Accelerator Hub gives away for free what used to be consulting business!!
Actually no, business accelerators are a win-win-win situation for Customers-Partners-SAP.
This is a true incident that happened in INT 214 session on both days of Teched 2023 in Bengaluru. Both session i had about a 50-50 breakup of customer and partners/consultants. I could only ask yes/no questions so that the participants could respond by a raise of hands.
Question to customers,
"Would you be more confident on starting an implementation project, if most of the content was only configuration or tweaking effort?"
- All hands went up except 1 customer, in the first session.
Question to the partners,
"Would you be interested if a lot of customers were confident to start fixed scope projects involving only configuration or tweaking effort?"
- All hands went up.
Question to the customers,
"Will you be happy if you were running the exact same pre built business logic as your nearest competitor?"
short pause - i could sense the discomfort, no hands went up.
"OR would you like to fire up some innovation projects to build up some unfair advantages?"
- All hands go up (including the customer who did not want prebuilt content)
Question to the partners,
"Do i even have to ask this-how do you feel about have 'a lot of customer' wanting to start custom development projects?"
- All hands shot up.
(Let me know in the comments, Which hat you wear? [Customer|Partner] and what would your responses be?)
Summary:
Most customers would grab the opportunity to quickly reach the 'state of art' using free prebuilt business accelerators but then would like to build bespoke competitive differentiators. This also means that with greater number of customers at the 'state of the art', partner have a bigger addressable market for bespoke projects.
- The blue circle is the ecosystem without prebuilt accelerators,
- We start with SAP enabling the discovery and consumption of pre built business accelerators. The growth in the ecosystem at this stage is driven by a strong match between customer requirement and the pre-built business accelerators being shipped.
- Customer see a reduction of TCO and risk hence are more likely to adopt SAP BTP to consume the pre built business accelerators.
- Customers still need partners to help them consume the accelerators via fixed price-fixed scope projects. Given the ecosystem has shifted into a higher orbit Partners will see some increase in the Total Addressable Market.
- SAP also uses pre built accelerators showcase innovation - a demonstration of the capabilities of the BTP platform
- Customers need to create competitive differentiators and maximise RoI on the software investment.
- This creates another fertile ground for partner to pitch bespoke projects to a growing ecosystem of customers.
- SAP Managed Tags:
