SAP : Celebrating One Year with SAP App Center

Within a year, the team has created a fully transactable, B2B marketplace, designed to bring the broadest range of innovations from partners of all sizes into the hands of customers in a simple, digital manner. At SAP App Center, customers can discover, try, buy and manage innovations from SAP's ecosystem that extend SAP offerings. Partners can now engage with over 388,000 SAP customers globally in a simpler more connected way than ever before, generating leads and winning deals that were never on their radar. With a continuously growing portfolio of over 1,500 solutions that include apps, extensions, plug-ins, microservices and content from more than 1,000 partners, SAP App Center has set the stage to help both customers and partners gain maximum value out of their SAP investments and continue to innovate themselves into digital cloud companies.

How far we've come and what we're doing

The SAP App Center offers a highly scalable cloud service that helps customers and partners connect with each other in a simple, digital manner. With a customer-first approach, the SAP App Center allows customers to discover information about solutions, read user reviews, look up certifications and self-declarations, and start conversations with partners. Customers can also get started quickly with a free or paid trial for certain products. With the help of a roles- and workflow-based transactional engine, customers can easily map the enterprise-procurement process to a simpler digital-procurement process.

Partners can manage their listings; set up simple, one-time fees for recurring, multi-dimensional pricing; manage leads and discounts; create custom commercial offerings for customers with special terms and conditions; and configure auto as well as manual order processing in a self-service manner. Both customers and partners can leverage the transaction, invoicing, billing and payment processing capabilities of the platform.

All of the above also ties back neatly to the new SAP.com experience, announced earlier this month at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, with SAP App Center powering SAP.com's ability to position partner apps and SAP offerings side-by-side. All of this enables customers to confidently purchase offerings directly from partners, with the transaction facilitated by SAP App Center, breaking down barriers to accessing the solutions they need. At the same time, SAP supplies its partners with the capabilities they need to bring their solutions to their customers and manage the full transaction experience directly.

A frictionless experience for our customers

As we continue expanding our customer-first approach, we sought to help our customers address their key challenges and business issues. Providing a mix of free and paid apps from ours partners, SAP App Center lets customers take advantage of a truly frictionless experience from discovering the offerings they need, to trying them out, to purchasing them, and finally to managing their subscriptions and licenses across all of SAP and its partners in one place.

For example, Marc Farrugia, vice president of Human Resources at Sun Communities was able to purchase application licenses directly from SAP partner Semos through the SAP App Center. 'We were able to filter by the types of products we had and find useful partner apps for our needs within minutes,' said Farrugia. 'We came across Semos' JobPts and began the purchasing process same day. Within ninety days we rolled out a new rewards and recognition platform that's seen a 175% increase in employee engagement over our previous platform.'

Managing all this in one place equipped Sun Communities with the flexibility to negotiate on price, and how and when they receive and pay invoices - getting the best support as well as terms and conditions, individually tailored to their needs. This is what we offer to all our customers in the SAP App Center - a way to manage multiple subscriptions as well as billing and vendor communications all in one place, under one unified experience.

Facilitating connections for our partners

In bringing a frictionless experience to our customers, SAP App Center also offers that same, seamless connection to our partners.

Our focus has been and will continue to be on co-innovation - creating a digital marketplace where our customers and partners can connect to do business and transact all in one place. As part of SAP Digital, when partners participate in the SAP App Center they gain the sales support of SAP, along with the ability to reach more customers, leverage a completely digital experience, and market and deliver their apps and solutions directly to SAP's worldwide customers. By enabling them to own every aspect of the customer relationship through SAP App Center, they're accessing the new experience on SAP.com and creating the world-class experience that drives our business and our customers' businesses.

We're excited to look ahead at the next year, bringing more customers, partners and lines of business into the SAP App Center. As a major building block in SAP's overall digital transformation, SAP App Center plays a key role in moving us forward through the digital landscape - bringing our customers and our partners with us.

To learn more, take a look at this infographic and/or visit www.sapappcenter.com.

Uddhav Gupta, is general vice president & general manager of SAP App Center, SAP Digital

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Top image via Shutterstock.