Is variety the spice of software partners’ offerings? With an overwhelming amount of public and private organizations seeking partners to help with digital transformation and change management journeys, more wannabe partners are adjusting their scope to meet growing demand.
Transforming from a very services-driven company, digital transformation firm and software provider, SNP, can be seen naturally evolving towards its software-driven targets.
One especially integral part of this strategy was the acquisition of Datavard, the software and consulting company specializing in transformations and data management in SAP landscapes, back in 2021. On this, SNP’s CPO, Tara von Metzen, said that SNP enhanced its capabilities by welcoming Datavard, as it allows companies to generate value from their data transformation using one software solution.
However, as discussed with ERP Today at the SNP Transformation World conference in Heidelberg, Germany, the company has set off on a journey to reflect this balance of software and service in its technology strategy.
“So the migration capabilities that we’ve always had with SNP are being married together with our data integration capabilities to be able to move data from a technology perspective, from any SAP source into any non-SAP source, but also from any source into SAP as well,” von Metzen tells us.
While focusing on core SAP and evolving with the company, SNP is planning to “evolve with its customers as well”. As the market changes dramatically and customers move to more applications, “it’s business capabilities they’re looking for rather than just big monoliths,” von Metzen says. So, SNP sees its flexible strategy as a strength, to leverage its existing capabilities and delve into various migrations and transformations, outside of SAP too, as “especially in the area of SAP, we see people branching out a lot more”.
The company’s SAP focus is now seen as just one part of the strategy and a “little corner of the world”. When it comes to moving data, SNP is looking to diversify its offering and, arguably, the provider has a good head start given it already has some data integration capabilities, as the markets of data integration and migration have been converging for a while.
In the meantime, the business has outlined several core markets where it expects to see “substantial growth in the next years,” as Alexander Arnold, SNP’s COO, says, listing Brazil, as the largest IT market and SAP market in South America, Mexico, France, the Nordics and the Middle East.
When it comes to broadening the teams’ expertise to include other ERP systems, “that’s a bit of a black box for us,” von Metzen admits, but as there are some similar structures, “we can utilize our past knowledge to help us, especially around AI, the discovery of data, the data structures and the connectivity between the data.”
Demand is perhaps the biggest indicator of how organizations are adjusting their focus and priorities, and the vendors’ job is made easier by staying tuned in and open to how the market is changing and what their customers need the most. In a rich scene of companies seeking targeted help to optimize and modernize their operations, variety is definitely the spice of software partners’ offerings to look out for.
