At the SAP Go-to-Market Kick-Off in Lisbon, a selection of SAP’s partners gathered to clarify the direction forward. The focus was less on product launches and more on how standards, business data, AI, and partnerships together will create faster and more sustainable customer value. In this article, Erik Glasmästar at Implema shares his key insights on what SAP’s strategy means in practice for customers.
Hello Erik Glasmästar, you represented Implema at the SAP Go-to-Market Kick-Off in Lisbon. What really stood out?
What stood out most was how clearly SAP uses go-to-market as a framework for how customer value is actually created, and not as a plan for product launches. The focus was on how strategy, data, AI, and partnerships need to be connected so that customers can move faster from ambition to actual impact.
SAP talks a lot about customer value, what do they mean more specifically?
It’s about a clear shift away from lengthy initiatives that may have an impact in several years. SAP emphasized the importance of shorter value cycles, more frequent deliveries, and a clearer link to business results. Less future visions, more everyday benefits.
Clean Core comes up often. Why is it so central right now?
Because Clean Core is a prerequisite for almost everything else SAP wants to enable. Organizations that have built a lot of custom solutions find it difficult to upgrade, innovate, and adopt new features – especially in AI. SAP is very clear: keep the core clean and differentiate where it really creates business value.
Business data is highlighted as crucial. How did SAP see it?
Business data was seen as the hub of the entire strategy. With initiatives such as SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP wants to make data more cohesive, reliable, and usable across system boundaries. It is a response to a very concrete customer problem: that data often exists, but cannot be used effectively for management and decision-making.
And AI, what was new beyond the hype?
The most interesting thing was that SAP was very clear about what AI is not supposed to be. It should not be about isolated tests or innovation initiatives without a clear business connection. Instead, AI should be built into business processes, based on accurate business data, and solve real problems such as reducing manual work, improving decision-making data, and simplifying everyday life.
How does this affect SAP’s view of partnerships?
SAP is signaling a clear shift towards fewer, more strategic partners. It is not enough to be able to configure systems, but partners are expected to understand the customer’s business, take responsibility for the whole, and contribute to end-to-end value. For customers, this means less complexity and clearer responsibility.
SAP also talks about transformation in a different way. How so?
Instead of large, infrequent transformation projects, SAP highlights the need to build organizations’ ability to change continuously. Transformation is seen more as a continuous capacity than a single project, with more frequent value deliveries and a clearer link to business results.
In conclusion, if you summarize, what does this mean for customers?
Customers who have control over their architecture, their data, and their way of working will be able to adopt SAP’s development significantly faster than others. Our role at Implema is to help customers understand what is important to do now, what can wait, and how SAP’s strategy can be translated into real business benefits without creating unnecessary complexity.
The SAP Go-to-Market Kick-Off in Lisbon sent a clear signal: the competitiveness of the future is not determined by individual system choices, but by the ability to combine standards, business data, AI, and partnerships into faster and more sustainable customer value. For customers, the choice of partner is becoming increasingly important; they need someone who understands both the direction and how it is put into practice.
