SAP AG: Orchestrating the Ecosystem
On a beautiful sunny afternoon in July 2007, Zia Yusuf, the Executive Vice President, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group at SAP, took a sip of his cappuccino as he walked into his office. Yusuf found a new PowerPoint deck on his desk and his attention turned to Nakisa Inc., a small software company seeking Tier 1 status within SAP. But for the Montreal-based succession-planning software company to achieve the prized Tier 1 status, there would have to be a business case presented to the Board, one that justified, on an array of criteria, the rationale for this award. If it did happen, tiny Nakisa would take its place, in a very small and select circle, alongside such companies as Adobe, Cisco, and Microsoft. Five years ago, SAP would likely have built the application with its own engineering organization. Yusuf’s team had worked with SAP’s product management organization to put together a deck of slides on the Nakisa partnership to be presented to the SAP Board. Yusuf flipped through the deck and wondered if the recommendation to elevate Nakisa to Tier 1 status really made sense.
Yusuf reflected for a moment on how far things had come in just a few years, to even be considering this. Prior to 2000, organizations in the enterprise resource planning software (ERP) industry—notably archrivals SAP and Oracle—played clear-cut roles in the complex process of developing and installing enterprise applications, even as the nature of the product demanded extensive collaboration between software supplier, enterprise customer, and the system integrators that drove implementation. SAP’s technology and its ability to create new areas of business process expertise for new applications were instrumental in making the firm the world’s leader in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) field (see Exhibit 1).
In the new century, with the