How IBM’s Strategy as an SAP Partner is Evolving

Feeding the Ecosystem Competitors , Partners

1. Just a couple of days ago I met IBM's new General Manager for its SAP alliance, Todd Kirtley. For me this meeting was very interesting for two reasons: For one thing, I am still under the impression of SAP's recent announcements by its top executives to put a new focus on its ecosystem. So meeting the new SAP alliance manager of SAP's largest and strongest partner and discussing with him the current situation and his view on SAP, challenging him with regard to IBM's SAP strategy, was the right thing to do at the right time (let me take the opportunity to again thank Todd very much for spending time with me). Of course we started our discussion with SAP's major topics, “mobility”, “on demand” and - highly interesting to discuss, I will come back to this a bit later - all the topics linked to BI/in-memory/HANA. Todd made it clear that in his view, IBM’s major opportunities and differentiators were related to its unique capability to bring innovation to the market. And, as Jim Hagemann-Snabe pointed out, SAP is currently driving more innovations than ever before. For this reason, one of his major ... (Read Full Article)

   Bookmark or Share this article