SAP SME Partner Summit 2023 – Vienna: An executive summary of the Day One Keynotes

SAP has now completed the 2023 SME Partner Summit sessions which were specifically targeted at the SME (small and midsize enterprise) partner community which for SAP, is primarily partners focused on SAP Business One with a number of the bigger partners that have invested in SAP Business ByDesign.

Last Year – What not to do

Last year, coming of the back of the “end’ of the Covid19 pandemic and the return to live events, SAP ran 3 events in Orlando, Manila and Barcelona and if you read between the lines and are at all engaged with my content on social media, they managed to alienate most of their channel partners who , same as this years audience, are mainly focused on SAP Business One but got a wall to wall SAP S4/HANA and Business ByDesign sales pitch.

Clearly based on the comments from the keynotes this year, SAP heard loud and clear that partners were not happy with what happened at last years event and were focused on trying to re-balance back in favor of SAP Business One as that is what the audience was there to hear about, and SAP have made a number of important strategic decisions that they were keen to share.

After blowing a significant amount of money last year sponsoring the events in Asia Pacific and the Americas, I made the decision this year to wait until the final event which this year took place in Vienna, Austria which was a 30-hour travel exercise, but I figured that I had never done an EMEA event and hoped that SAP would have finalized their messaging by the final event.

I certainly spoke to partners and sponsors that attended the first 2023 event in Bangkok and some that then also attended the event in Panama and I was interested that a number of people mentioned that the keynote messaging changed from the first to the second event so I was keen to then see what was the final positioning and it was clear that again SAP was listening to the feedback, some quietly given and some less quietly and a lot based on partners voting with their feet.

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The Core Take Aways

You don’t need to hear it from me again as I have been saying this to as many people at SAP that would listen as well as to SAP Business One Partners and a not small number of SAP Business One customers who have been asking –

“what is the future of SAP Business One, SAP don’t seem to care, don’t talk about it and seem to want me to do/buy/sell any other product other than SAP Business One”

The event in Vienna started with multiple keynote presentations where the presenters all said, hey, we, SAP, got it wrong with our product strategy around the SME space – we ignored the product that clearly the market wants and loves in favor of other products that have been less than stellar.

The SME Market for SAP by the numbers

As an example, the customer numbers were quoted on stage – SAP Business One has 80,000 plus customers around the globe and in 2022 added 4,000 plus net new customers.

SAP BusinessByDesign after 10+ years and an inordinate amount of money spent, has 3000 customers total – less than B1 added in 2022 alone.

The S4/HANA Public Cloud in SME numbers weren’t quoted but as one presenter said the growth percentages looked good but its easy coming of a low (zero customers) ?baseline.

Unfortunately the first presenter after issuing the “mea culpa” statement about the mistake of ignoring B1 partners and customers then went on to spend the remaining 70% of his keynote talking about S4/HANA Public Cloud and all the investments SAP were making and said nothing about B1 and of course even less about ByDesign which left me shaking my head in disbelief.

The next keynote presenter was much more focused and clear, ?Oliver Bahner, Senior Vice President, Head of Midmarket and Ecosystem Success, SAP Cloud ERP , did not mince his words on the topic and again re-iterated that SAP had got it wrong (with an apology) when it came to SME and delivered a very clear message that there are 2 products going forward in SAP’s SME ERP Product Portfolio:

• SAP Business One
• SAP S4/HANA Public Cloud

The message on SAP Business ByDesign was also clear – SAP have finished doing new feature development, the product and customers would be supported until contractually obliged to (at least 10 years I believe was the number) ?but partners should pick another product for new business opportunities and customers should look to move to one of the 2 focus products when it makes sense to.

Sorry, What?

One of the “sorry, what did you say?” moments was the “announcement” that SAP were now working on another product based on the SAP Business One product functionality for new small business customers looking for an SAP hosted cloud product , tentatively (I guess) called SAP Business One Cloud Edition that initially was positioned as going up against Xero and QuickBooks – a market segment that is huge but sits a level underneath the SAP Business One product as it sits today.

This new product will be at least 5 years away but as another large German partner said, lets see what they deliver over the next few years as many of those of us that have been in the SAP world for many years have heard this story before with another failed attempt to build a small business product as a skunkworks project that was shut down and took a few people out in the process.

The Good News (one more time)

For SAP Business One, the message was clear – SAP is re-investing in the product (not that they stopped) and will continue to focus on enhancing the Web Client, reinforcing the security of the product in line with SAP’s cloud product standards and making sure that partners and customers are left in no doubt about the long term future of the solution.

After all who would de-emphasize a product with 95+ % renewal rates on maintenance, a dedicated customer base and a partner community with 1000’s of trained and certified consultants and sales people, that is SAP's most used ERP solution by number of customers and is also highly profitable for SAP.

In my next articles I will drill down in detail on the product sessions and the take aways from those as well as the perennial “Does SAP think SAP Business One is a cloud solution” discussion with some clear, unambiguous answers from Rainer Zinow, Senior Vice President SME Solutions - here's a sneak preview, the answers have nothing to do with product or technology...