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The InsideTrack Contents
Special Partner Summit Edition
Welcome to the Inside Track
An introduction from Rafael Brugnini, Chief Partner Officer, EMEA.
Thought Leader
Karl Fahrbach, Global Chief Partner Officer and Regional President of EMEA
Augusta Spinelli unveil the strategic priorities for 2026.
Spotlight on: Partner First
Rafael Brugnini, Chief Partner Officer, EMEA, on the market opportunity and Santina Franchi, Global President of SAP Corporate & GROW with SAP on going 100% Indirect in Corporate.
Partner Business Essentials
Utkarsh Maheshwari, Senior Vice President & Head of Global Partner Sales and Services and Head of Channel, EMEA Rich Phillips drill into the detail on how partners can seize the opportunity and how SAP will help them.
Welcome.
This is the final edition of The Inside Track for 2025 and this time, we’re doing things a bit differently; this edition brings you all the key headlines from this month’s SAP Partner Summit, held in Berlin.
It’s the first time we’ve joined our colleagues and partners from across MEE for a Summit and, for those of you not there with us, it was a huge success.
We focused on our go-to-market strategy for 2026, unveiling our priorities for the year ahead and introducing a batch of brand-new programmes and initiatives that will help us all to deliver, together. Top flight footballing legend, Jürgen Klopp, even joined us for our closing keynote, offering expert advice on how to lead teams to success!
Huge thanks to our sponsorship partners, Tricentis, Syniti and OpenText, and to the 2,200 partners that travelled from across 48 different countries to join us.
Check out the highlights to get a flavour of what happened, and then delve into the pages that follow to get all the detail on how to plan your roadmap to success.
Finally, as we head towards the end of the year, I’d like to thank you for your hard work over the last 12 months – we couldn’t have done it without you!
Rafael Brugnini Chief Partner Officer, EMEA
Click here to watch the highlights video
The Thought Leader
EMEA: Growth-driven, Bold and Forward-Thinking
At the 2025 SAP Partner Summit, Augusta Spinelli, Regional President of EMEA and Karl Fahrbach, Global Chief Partner Officer, shared a sneak peek of SAP’s top go-to-market strategy for 2026 as well as a host of brand-new programmes for partners.
Here, Augusta and Karl talk exclusively to the Inside Track about the goals for the next twelve months, how crucial partners are to those goals, and how SAP will help partners to deliver.
“Partners are essential,” says Karl. “They turn our artificial intelligence and data innovations into real customer outcomes from faster adoption and larger opportunities to higher renewals. They add real value.”
“…We simply cannot deliver… without partners!”
— Karl Fahrbach
He says partners give SAP scale, industry expertise and the go-to-market engine to reach more customers across more markets.
“Partners co-innovate with us, they embed solutions into the SAP Business Suite, and they accelerate time-to-value so that our customes see results sooner. The bottom line? We simply cannot deliver on our priorities without partners!”
Top priorities for SAP partners in the coming year will include:
1. Building profitable businesses through SAP Business Suite
The SAP Business Suite is the complete platform. It delivers AI-powered insights, harmonised, connected data and intelligent applications. It is continually expanding and improving through the introduction of new AI agents. So far, 20 agents are on the Suite. By the end of this year, that number will have doubled to 40.
“Our partners are the ones that bring the Business Suite to life. They build on top of it with their industry expertise to drive adoption and deliver value to our end-customers,” says Karl. Partners already using Business Suite have a two-and-a-half times higher win rate and the average size of an opportunity’s annual contract value (ACV), is doubled.
“SAP Business Suite is the future of enterprise management,” Karl adds.
2. Expanding Partner Autonomy
In 2026, SAP will hand greater autonomy to partners enabling them to win new Corporate customers and drive growth via the Partner-Led Territories initiative. This isn’t a change in SAP strategy or direction, but an acceleration of that strategy.
“The momentum for partner autonomy is real,” explains Karl. “We’ve been very successful working together with our clients and we will double down on that with greater focus on adoption and consumption and cross-selling Lines of Business.”
3. Focus on Public Cloud
There will be a stronger commitment to public cloud in 2026, with its clean core principles delivered via the RISE with SAP methodology and tool chain. “More partners are delivering RISE with SAP methodology every month and we expect to see that continue into the new year and beyond,” says Karl.
How SAP will Help Partners to Deliver
Three brand-new initiatives and programmes were announced at the Summit, each designed specifically to support partner delivery.
1. SAP Partner Accelerator
This enablement initiative brings with it: money to invest in demand generation, coaching to help partners to expand and grow using the SAP Business Suite, access to a community of partners (each bringing their own area of specialism) and certification. Karl says: “THIS IS A KEY INITIATIVE! It’s THE path for our partners to grow their Business Suite scope, with demand generation investment, coaching, access to Development Funds and more.
“It’s an unbeatable growth accelerator. Regardless of where partners are in their journey, they can position themselves as end-to-end innovators. Everything we do rewards partner autonomy and drives the growth of the Business Suite plus, as we invest in more automation and more tools, we’re making it simpler to be an SAP partner. And they can expect deeper enablement through new learning and certification courses that will help to differentiate them from their competitors.
Ultimately, in 2026, it’s all about making it easier for qualified partners to capture the huge opportunity ahead and to do it profitably. I invite all our qualified partners to join the Accelerator initiative!”
2. SAP Referral Programme
For partners that can’t cover every Line of Business, SAP has introduced the Referral Programme to ensure no opportunity is lost. The programme will see Partner Business Managers pass on opportunities to partners who do have the LOB expertise to deliver. If that opportunity is then closed, the referral partner will receive 10% of the ACV.
3. Partner Lead Routing
With time-to-value of the essence in today’s speedy market, in certain territories, SAP hands over the reigns to a partner to lead on an opportunity.
In 2026, the Partner Lead Routing programme will be enhanced and open up not just for Cloud ERP opportunities but for a range of different LOBs. Partners should speak to Partner Business Managers about all new programmes and incentives.
A Strong, Thriving, Partner-Ecosystem
Augusta was appointed Regional President of EMEA in August. With 25 years’ experience at SAP, and leading the Adoption Services Centre before taking on her new role, the customer-first approach has been central to her mindset and delivery.
This is no different in her new position with her priorities remaining focused on customer adoption and growth.
“They’re key,” she says, “for every single function at SAP. When we sell, we need to take the ‘Suite-first’, ‘AI-first’ approach.
Otherwise, we sell, but the adoption doesn’t happen. So our goal is to reduce churn and achieve high adoption rates, because they’re critical if we’re going to grow our Cloud business.”
She explains that by expanding SAP’s Corporate and Partner-driven businesses, thereby creating in effect a ‘back office’ for S/4 public cloud (ERP) for partner projects, the ecosystem will be strengthened. “Public cloud will be the leading solution in EMEA and this makes it easier for our customers to buy, adopt and consume our solutions and innovations.
“We have a strong, thriving partner ecosystem.”
— Augusta Spinelli
“Next year, EMEA will be recognised as a growth-driven, bold, forward-thinking region, because we’ll work together as one team across the board – SAP and partners – with a growth mindset.”
The partner ecosystem is ‘fundamental’ Augusta says to extending SAP’s capabilities and driving innovation for ‘every customer in the market’.
“We have a strong, thriving, partner ecosystem,” she adds. “It’s one of SAP’s greatest assets. And by expanding our collaboration with our partners, we’ll be able to deliver our AI-first, Suitefirst approach. We can ensure that the right skills are available to deliver value, together, to our customers.”
Augusta says it’s a ‘super exciting’ time to be a part of SAP and the technology industry.
“I love working in EMEA because we have innovative solutions, bold customers, a thriving partner ecosystem and the very best professionals. And in 2026, we will take the opportunity to invest in our people and to master the solutions that are going to solve the challenges our customers face, whether that be Public Cloud, AI, the Business Data Cloud (BDC) or Business Suite.”
Connect with Karl Fahrbach on Linkedin
Connect with Augusta Spinelli on Linkedin
Spotlight on...
The City of Partnership
SAP announced two major moves that further extend SAP’s ecosystem-first strategy at the Partner Summit: the move to significantly increase the proportion of the indirect business in Corporate AND the expansion of Partner-Driven.
Here Rafael Brugnini, Chief Partner Officer, SAP EMEA and Santina Franchi, President of SAP Corporate segment and GROW business, dive into the detail behind the opportunity and how SAP and its partners can take full advantage of it.
The market opportunity for the region of EMEA stands at €107bn in cloud revenue, excluding services.
But, to take advantage of it, says Rafa, SAP and partners ‘have to evolve the way we work’ by working together. And SAP is ‘fully committed’ to doing that in 2026. It’s demonstrated through SAP’s introduction of a sweep of new programmes, rebates and initiatives, not least the expansion of Partner-Driven, which marks a seismic step forward in SAP’s ‘partner-first’ strategy.
“This is a real leap-frog moment!” enthuses Rafa. “It’s unique and means we will drive the entire market segment with and through our partners. We know that customers are
struggling under the pressures they face and the reality is they need technology to improve and evolve their business processes, to be compliant and more competitive. And we have the magic recipe to help them to evolve – SAP and our partners.”
Of the market opportunity available, there are some 250,000 companies in the Corporate space in EMEA that are not yet engaged with SAP.
“ There are 250,000 companies in the Corporate space, ready and waiting for an SAP partner to show up and help them to transform!” — Rafael Brugnini
But as the opportuntiy in Corporate is far bigger than just in Midmarket (more than 7,000 accounts have turnovers of more than €500 million and 3,600 have turnovers of 1billion), it will take ‘the entire ecosystem working together to solve their problems’. Says Rafa: “Some of these companies are big and complex and need a lot of help. And that’s where we need ISVs, VARs, GSSPs and hyperscalers to develop the solutions that will help them to transform into efficient, smooth-running, businesses.”
Looking at growth predictions across the portfolio, year-on-year growth is forecast across all of the SAP Business Suite, namely: Human Capital Management, Finance and Spend, Customer Relationship Management, Business Technology Platform, Supply Chain Management and SAP ByDesign.
Turning the spotlight on AI, currently just 20% of companies in the market are taking advantage of the value it can bring. “This is where we need our partners to deliver
AI use-cases with measurable return on investment, with scalable business outcomes that connect with a customer’s top priorities. And that’s where the partner will win – and win faster!”
In terms of expectations from customers, Rafa is clear on what they don’t want: long, drawn-out, technology projects. Instead, they’re looking for predictable business outcomes that are delivered fast.
They want to shift the amount of investment they’re spending today ‘keeping the lights on’ and spend that money instead on strategic services that help them to transform their business processes. But Rafa cautions: “Our competitors and their partners are talking to customers too, even when they’re not able to do a fraction of what we can do together here at SAP. Our AI-data-apps approach is unmatched in the market, and we need to tell that story right.”
SAP will help by bringing partners new rebates, enablement funds ‘for every role’, new digital tools and, most importantly, the commitment to go to the market with and through partners.
“In summary, we will help our partners to grow faster, operate smarter and scale with confidence in EMEA to make our purpose come true: to make the world run better and improve people’s lives,” smiles Rafa. “This is our moment in EMEA! The customers are ready to transform, they’re
waiting for us. It’s time to lead the market, not follow the market.”
Santina Franchi has led the SAP Corporate segment and GROW since March this year. Her team looks after 80% of SAP’s clients and represents 28% of the overall SAP revenue in EMEA.
“ the fly-wheel effect – AI, data and apps – presents a huge new opportunity for partners…
— Santina Franchi
This is one of the fastest-growing businesses for SAP and, in EMEA alone – in quarter four 2025 – Cloud ERP grew by 95% year-on-year.
While the market opportunity is ‘massive’ for business applications, it’s ‘even bigger’ for AI, standing at more than €2 trillion, according to Gartner.
Translating that opportunity into real business outcomes for partners, Santina says it’s important for partners to lead with the ‘fly-wheel’ effect: that virtuous circle of AI, data and apps. That is the ‘gamechanger’ for partners and is where SAP has a unique position in the market.
She explains: “Customers are already experimenting with AI – either with SAP or with another vendor. But the most important thing for our partners to have in mind is that all that experimentation struggles to scale, to go into production and to deliver real and tangible business return on investment. Why? Because an agent needs to understand the semantics of the data and needs to understand the anthology of the process to make sure that the action that the agent can take is coherent with the business of a company. This is why the SAP AI strategy is unmatched.
“SAP Business AI can be consumed as embedded in our Business Suite; it can be further built on SAP and it can also work with third party vendors. Whichever route a partner takes, what is needed is an SAP infrastructure at the back that can understand the data and decide how to act in the context of the end-to-end business processes. This is what’s making SAP so
“...it’s indirect by default… no opportunity should be handled without partners”
— Santina Franchi
successful in bringing use-cases at scale.” Looking at the evolution in how Corporate works with partners, Santina says it’s completely aligned to put the ecosystem at the centre.
“Partners have always had a big role to play in Corporate business but now, we want our partners contributing more than ever. We have millions of clients in this segment and helping them realise the value with the SAP Business Suite is a gigantic opportunity for our ecosystem. This is why we’ve come to a strategic decision that the SAP Corporate business is indirect by default. That means that no opportunity should be handled without partners.”
She said it was important for partners to be ready for all the opportunities that SAP will be bringing their way.
Meanwhile, the change to Partner-Led Territories is another huge opportunity for partners with SAP giving them five times the size of the territories they’ve seen until now. “This is a HUGE jump and I’m looking at ALL our partners – the entire ecosystem – to help deliver this,” explains Santina.
“This is not just about re-sellers working on their own. It’s about re-sellers working with partner-to-partner referrals. It’s also about re-sellers leveraging hyperscalers, because they’re massively investing in our clients and their business is synergystic with SAP’s. “And it’s about the independent software vendors [ISVs] continuously bringing additional vertical and horizontal capabilities on top of what SAP is able to provide. All partners are critical if we want to strategically capture the opportuntiy we have ahead of us!”
This is why, Santina adds, SAP has invested and enhanced its working models to support partners in 2026, including the placement of all regional Digital Hubs in service of partners. This is one of the ‘most fundamental moves’ that will support the customer value journey from beginning to end. Digital Hubs are the engine for increased velocity and should be leveraged by partners as much as possible .
“We want to see our partners at the forefront, leading each customer engagement with demos and turning them fast into minimum viable products as soon as they get the data from the client
– then continuing with an ongoing cycle of adoption and consumption.”
What’s more, SAP will support with incountry execution by having territory and ecosystem managers in place, continuing to deliver sales excellence on the revenue commitments made with partners.
Santina’s final message to partners is:“To shift the conversation with customers. Up until now they’ve been leading with the apps, with single lines of business and a clear focus on the product. What I ask now is for them to move away from this and, instead, lead with AI. Always start the conversation with every customer with ‘what are you doing with AI’, even if at the end the customer only chooses Cloud ERP. Cloud ERP will power all the customers’ AI needs and investments. Then it’s about continuing the journey to the SAP Business Suite. It’s not about selling one solution but being a strategic partner for the client with intellectual property, with more volume of continuous value delivery.
“In India alone, as an example, we have one Cloud ERP going live per day. So volume can be achieved. If partners go on this journey then that is where I want to go with them. Every one of our partners can grow ten fold if they take the direction we’ve been describing. And it starts this quarter. I’d like to see us go full speed in this direction, and our partners will see their business multiplied.”
EMEA Market Opportunity
€107bn IN CLOUD REVENUE (EXC. SERVICES)
44%
250,000+ IN THE CORPORATE SPACE
COMPANIES WAITING TO BE ENGAGED
Business Essentials
Recipe for 2026 Success
Off the back of the priorities announced by SAP at the Partner Summit, Utkarsh Maheshwari,
Senior Vice President
&
Head
of Global Partner Sales and Services and Rich Phillips, Head of Channel, EMEA, reflect on the headlines and advise partners on how to lay the foundations for a triumphant 2026.
“The beauty of our solutions is you can start anywhere and go anywhere. ”
— Utkarsh Maheshwari
InsideTrack: Utkarsh, Rich, what are the most significant changes that partners will see in their engagement with SAP in 2026?
Utkarsh: 2026 is going to be a monumental year for our business. To become a ‘Suitefirst’, ‘AI-first’ company, we will become a ‘partner-first’ company. This is going to play out in several forms. First, we’re going to have a super pointed go-to-market together with our partners, one that’s hyper focused on Corporate, and we’re going to win all the market share – that we so rightly deserve – together with our partners. We’re going to redefine the partner engagement, surrounding partners with the best experience from a demand
generation, marketing, solution advisory and enablement perspective. Plus, they’ll get the best commercials in 2026 that they’ve seen, to help them to build a profitable business.
Rich: Great question but, for me, it’s more about evolution rather than change. Over the last few years, SAP has become steadily more and more indirect focused, creating demand with and for partners and executing those opportunities with partners to closure. For 2026, we’re moving
to a model which is 100% indirect in our Corporate segment and we’re expanding partner-driven. In partner-driven we will work with our partners in a wholly selfsufficient way. Partners will move into a model that’s about them rather than about SAP and then the partner.
“...partners bring the local market expertise as well as the scale,”
— Utkarsh Maheshwari
Inside Track: And what are the top three things that partners should prioritise to ensure success?
Utkarsh: First, together, we have to focus on the best business planning. We have a new tool and a new mutual commitment towards business planning. And that includes the entirety of the Suite solutions that we have to offer and that includes a partner’s fundamental commitment by quarters, and to make it a living and breathing process.
The second is living the ‘Suite-first’, ‘AI-first’ strategy. So, when building their business plans, partners need to commit to how to conquer the market, not only on Cloud ERP but with the fantastic range of public cloud solutions we have.
The third thing is building a volume predictable business. How? Well, I’d advise partners to consider what kind of pre-sales, sales, demand generation capabilities they need to connect the dots with the go-tomarket on SAP’s side.
Rich: If I try and encapsulate it into a sentence it’s: packaging, packaging, packaging or packaging provokes partner profits.
If we think about partner-driven, partners will have full exclusivity to close all the opportunities they can create, which will boost their profitability. If they spend time creating a package versus a defined bill of materials, it eliminates their need to engage with SAP during that transaction.
If they sell that solution, our data shows they can do that about 20% faster. So if a partner has four sales people today and they exclusively move to selling packages, they will have the equivalent of five sales people, so they’re expanding their sales team with no additional cost and boosting their profitability. And for delivery, because it’s pre-built and tested, they can deploy those solutions with lower cost consultants, again boosting profitability.
Inside Track: It’s a dynamic world out there, what do you foresee being the biggest – potentially disruptive –challenges in 2026, and what can we all do to withstand them?
Utkarsh: If there’s one thing that 2025 has taught us it is that the pace of change, the rate of transformation, is not going to decrease for us. What that means is that AI and AI-led outcomes are continuing to build more disruption into businesses. Only 20% of our customers are truly harnessing
the power of AI so as a collective organisational capability, we really need to bring this AI-led outcome story to the market. Then we can rest assured that we’re building a stable business together.
Rich: Frankly, who knows! If you’d asked me that five years’ ago I wouldn’t have said a global pandemic or a war in Europe. So let’s focus instead on what we can control: relentless demand generation – that’s absolutely required for cloud; qualify out early and only sell what is perfect for you; make sure you’ve got a package solution created and sell that again and again and again. Focus on what you can control and from that you’ll derive your profitability.
Rich: We’ll have to weave with what happens around the world but remember what’s most likely to happen will cause supply chain disruption, and who is best to resolve that? The number one supply chain ERP vendor in the world: SAP and its partners.
“Packaging provokes partner profits,”
— Rich Phillips
Inside Track: SAP Business Suite is our flagship solution. How can partners maximise its enormous potential?
Utkarsh: In our install base today, and with the customers we have, most of them have less than two lines of business in their install. That means that there’s a massive untapped opportunity for us. The beauty of our solutions is you can start anywhere and go anywhere. That means a partner can start with cloud ERP and build either native capabilities to address the rest of the solutions, or work with a partner on a partner-to-partner based approach. Or they can take advantage of one of our new commercial offers such as the referral programme.
So, the possibilities are out there, I don’t want anything to be left untapped. To further augment our partners’ capabilities, we’ve also announced the new Partner Accelerator Programme towards the Suite and I encourage them to get on board with that too.
“Customer lifetime value: focus on that,”
— Rich Phillips
Rich: The Business Suite is one of the largest changes that’s happened in the world of SAP for many years. For any partner with an install base, I strongly encourage them to understand all the messaging around the Business Suite, the integration points that it provokes and take that to your install base.
Make sure all your consultants are trained and certified. That will boost your profitability. Going to your install base, selling the value and deploying those experienced consultants is how you’re going to make your profit in 2026.
Inside Track: And finally, our partners remain our strength but what would you like to see more of from them in 2026?
Utkarsh: Partners are the biggest asset we have at SAP, and that we will continue to have, and they’re the cornerstone of our Corporate strategy. But with all the goodness that exists in the ecosystem there is one thing we need to focus on and that is building a predictable, volume, runrate business together.
A very different conversation needs to be had in a public cloud orientated world and I would encourage our partners to continue having that conversation with us on an ongoing basis, to be fast out of the gate with the value that we’re delivering. It’s all about consumption, it’s all about value.
“SAP Business Suite is one of the largest changes… in the world of SAP for many years,”
— Rich Phillips
Rich: From my – selfish! – perspective, I want to see more focus on cloud subscription revenue, but actually, for our partners, it’s also critical. It’s clear the benefit it brings to SAP but for our partners, if they win the cloud subscription business at one of their customers, they win that business.
If partners are deploying their intellectual property, or their QPPS, then for as long as that customer is using that IP, that package, they will pay the partner for that on a monthly subscription basis. They will also pay the partner for the SAP platform and, of course, partners retain their margins from that platform. The longer a partner has a customer doing that, the more profit they will make from that customer. Customer Lifetime Value: focus on that.
The InsideTrack
The Essential Upate for SAP Partners.
Illustrating the Inside Track
This edition of the Inside Track features the stunning illustrative work of Lydia Hill, a freelance illustrator based in Sheffield, England. Her diverse and quirky style is much in demand among clients such as AWS, Trustpilot, Vauxhall and Hoefler&Co.