The SAP Pinnacle Awards, our most prestigious global partner recognition program, shine a spotlight on our top-performing partners that demonstrate excellence in unlocking innovative new ways for customers to run their businesses.

SAP’s ecosystem plays a key role in our vision to enable every organization and every industry to become a network of intelligent, sustainable enterprises. Through their unique industry expertise, implementation methodologies, complementary solutions, and commitment throughout the Customer Value Journey, partners help customers thrive and succeed with SAP.

Across 26 categories in the areas of Customer Success, Intelligent Enterprise Realization, Sustainability, and Social Impact, partners are recognized for their outstanding contributions, exponential growth, and simplification. Through delivering cloud innovations that help customers achieve their goals, these partners exemplify dedication to teamwork and embody our vision for partnering excellence.

Twenty-five of the 2024 winners and finalists were selected from SAP’s wide-ranging partner base, using system-generated data on core metrics and key performance indicators. A steering committee of global SAP representatives reviewed, vetted, and ranked the achievements according to our internal criteria, which aligned with SAP’s communicated business strategies.

The only exception is the Social Impact category, which recognized a partner’s lasting societal impact by leveraging SAP innovation with concrete results. Partner nominations were evaluated and ranked by a panel of jurors consisting of SAP internal and third-party representatives.

Winners and finalists for all categories will receive a communication package to help them promote their success to their customers, prospects, and the media, including logos for online and physical marketing vehicles. To increase their global exposure, SAP will list the winners and finalists on its Web site for an entire year, in addition to running a comprehensive campaign that promotes these winners and finalists to joint prospects and customers.

Congratulations to the winners and finalists! We look forward to celebrating your success at SAP Partner Connect and SAP Sapphire.

Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at SAP.

With the gathering pace of headlines touting artificial intelligence in the business press, one could be forgiven for assuming that all facets of the enterprise stand to benefit equally from its application – everything from the electric stapler to the espresso machine to the ergonomic furniture.

But in reality, some functions are much better suited than others to gain from AI. The deeper the reservoir of data associated with an operational process – and the broader the sharing of that data not only within an organization but among its trading partners as well – the greater the potential for AI to bolster collaborative capabilities, instill operational resilience, and unlock exponential value.

By facilitating the convergence of trading partners’ operational data, cloud-based networks strengthen transparency and foster collaboration across interconnected processes such as procurement, supply chain, logistics, and asset management. The vast troves of data accumulated from these functions – and the insights they reveal – bear significant implications for forecasting demand, planning inventory, sourcing components, procuring labor, maximizing utilization, managing logistics, gauging sustainability, achieving compliance, and securing financing. Yet the sheer volume of such data, sometimes spanning billions or more transactions, can defy human interpretation in the quest to optimize decision-making.

That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.

As the world’s largest B2B collaboration platform, SAP Business Network facilitates hundreds of millions of transactions per year, capturing a unified, end-to-end view of spend. So prodigious is the cloud-based network’s volume – exceeding US$5.3 trillion in commerce annually, greater than the gross domestic product of every nation except the United States and China – that, through innovations in predictive and generative AI technologies, SAP Business Network is transforming procurement, supply chain, logistics, asset management, and related operational processes, with the goal that every business runs as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

The cloud is uniquely fit for the task of delivering simplicity within a many-to-many network of trading partners. A network’s features, from its search functionality to the matching of buyers with suggested suppliers, must aid the dual goals of transparency and ease of use. Predictive and generative AI capabilities augment businesses’ ability to discover trading partners on the basis of complementary resources, mutual value, and strategic alignment. With every successive use, generative AI sharpens its ability to anticipate operations professionals’ requirements to match supply with demand. Meanwhile, AI helps businesses to automate their most time-consuming procurement and supply chain activities through predictive mechanisms as well, hastening the ability to arrive at better, more informed decisions. When applied to the broadest possible sets of operational data, AI removes the guesswork from business-to-business commerce and replaces it with new leads, renewed confidence, and resilient supply chains.

With these objectives in mind, SAP Business Network is transforming its powerful discovery functionality into a simple chat prompt this year. Also in 2024, generative AI will enable SAP Business Network to create catalog content based on existing data in the network, detect potential errors within invoices, and obtain quote requests from buyers via natural-language, on-screen dialogue with matched suppliers. Integrating AI capabilities into SAP Business Network thus promises to reshape the trading partner experience by enabling buyers to reach far more suppliers with precision for the specific goods and services they produce. Trading partners large and small benefit equally from the increased flow of accurate, detailed, and complete information identifying each other’s offerings and competitive advantages.

As AI technologies take shape and mature, infusing intelligence natively into business processes, digital commerce platforms are certain to introduce many enhanced capabilities. Naturally, with its scale and history of innovation, you can expect SAP Business Network to lead the way. But you’ll know the moment that artificial intelligence has truly transformed enterprise software when its features subtly blend in, almost imperceptibly, to simplify everyday operational processes, making business applications more intuitive and predictive for trading partners. That is our vision for AI at SAP Business Network, where the intelligence may be increasingly artificial but the commitment to customer success is invariably genuine.

For further information on SAP Business Network and how we are equipping enterprises with AI and other digital tools needed to counter disruption, visit sap.com/businessnetwork and sap.com/ai.

Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business Network.

When an organization starts its digital transformation journey, it does so expecting great outcomes. Whether that means increasing competitiveness, efficiency, innovation, growth, employee satisfaction, reducing costs, or all of the above — expectations are always high.

Expectations can also be very diverse. End users want their jobs to be made easier and more productive. The typical CIO wants scalability, greater data protections, and a secure IT infrastructure that runs with lower total cost of ownership.

And we — the cloud software provider — also have a clear-cut expectation that customers should actually use the software. Otherwise, bold transformation objectives won’t be met and subscription contracts won’t be renewed.

Disappointment is often described as the gap between expectations and reality. When software adoption is low and expectations for digital transformation outcomes are high, disappointment is almost guaranteed.

That is why we are making the changes necessary at SAP to increase customer adoption. Adoption is our main lever for increasing customer satisfaction by ensuring we deliver on the promise of large-scale transformation.

A New Ambition for Service Delivery

My goal leading our new Customer Services & Delivery Board area is to make it easier and faster for customers to adopt our solutions. We want to ensure that customers get all the benefits they are expecting out of their large-scale cloud transformation by reducing the hurdles and ensuring long-term value.

We are fully committed to ensuring that new digital opportunities are not only introduced, but also used to their full potential. Our focus is not on “lift-and-shift” to the cloud, but on holistically and actively supporting our customers in their transformation. And we act as customer advocates, trusted partners, and guardians of their interests.

My new Board area will therefore bundle services, including professional services, premium engagements, customer innovations, and customer support. In addition, it will include cloud infrastructure, cloud operations, cloud lifecycle management, and private cloud provision for SAP customers worldwide.

Why Now?

Adoption has always been at the core of our efforts. What’s different now is that a truly transformative technology — artificial intelligence — has emerged and is enabling end users to interact in more natural human ways. This has powerful technological and societal implications.

It is also presenting software providers like us with unique opportunities to enhance adoption. Think how easy (and fun) AI interactions have become. AI innovation is a catalyst for us to enhance adoption, and we are seizing the moment with determined steps toward providing SAP Business AI.

But for our valued customers to benefit from all the advantages of SAP Business AI, we really need to be there for them throughout their cloud transformation journey, because AI innovation only happens in the cloud.

What’s Changing?

We know that cloud customers want flexible and innovative solutions that help them solve their biggest challenges and that can be deployed quickly and consumed easily. For the past 52 years, we have been vested in the success of our customers with the best team of experts in the industry to support them at every point of the customer value journey. That has not changed!

What has changed, however, is that we are putting the power of my new Board area behind the delivery of our solutions, providing governance and support to our delivery ecosystem, and continuously improving our cloud delivery and support methodologies. And we have created a unique opportunity to bring together cloud operations to streamline the entire customer experience.

Our overarching objective is customer satisfaction. We are committed to increasing it through comprehensive and innovative post-sales technical delivery services or partner-led implementations to drive our customers’ business transformation and deliver measurable value, which is “business speak” for absolutely delighting them! That’s how we will ensure organizations can fully realize their new digital opportunities.

Offering Transformation as a Service

We deliver the most complete business transformation suite in the industry. That has been our ambition since launching RISE with SAP some years ago. With the range of capabilities on offer today — including RISE with SAP, GROW with SAP, SAP Signavio, cloud application lifecycle management, SAP LeanIX, and, of course, SAP Business Technology Platform — we are well on our way to enabling customers to accelerate transformation.

We are committed to optimizing our portfolio for delivery, and we are working on tooling and automation to speed up the process. That’s how we are reaffirming our promise to provide transformation as a service. 

Closing the Gap Between Expectations and Outcomes

Adoption of our portfolio opens new possibilities for business model innovation along with increased competitiveness, cost savings, and employee satisfaction, while realizing the benefits of new SAP innovations more quickly: essentially all the outcomes organizations are expecting when they set out on the pathway to digital transformation.

So, you could say, we’re more dedicated than ever to closing the gap between expectations for cloud transformation and the corresponding outcomes.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, leading Customer Services & Delivery.