Since it was first unveiled in 2017, the SAP App Cen­ter has been con­nect­ing cus­tomers with more than 1,600 appli­ca­tions, exten­sions, and third-par­ty ser­vices to enhance their SAP sys­tems. A per­fect exam­ple of this is the Queen of Raw app, which became part of the SAP App Cen­ter in August 2020. Queen of Raw res­cues dis­card­ed or unused tex­tiles and incor­po­rates them back into the sup­ply chain where they’re need­ed. The company’s app inte­grates with SAP S/4HANA and helps users auto­mate the track­ing process of unused tex­tiles. SAP cus­tomers who have the app can eas­i­ly move any left­over mate­ri­als from their oper­a­tions to the Queen of Raw mar­ket­place, where they are mar­ket­ed to and sold to the company’s com­mu­ni­ty. And those SAP cus­tomers in the appar­el and fash­ion indus­try who are look­ing to pur­chase mate­ri­als can source them from that same marketplace. 

The SAP App Cen­ter is a vital resource where cus­tomers can find third-par­ty solu­tions like the Queen of Raw app. And SAP part­ners sell­ing appli­ca­tions and ser­vices to SAP cus­tomers also can lever­age the SAP App Cen­ter to reach more users. 

Over the past few months, SAP has announced some sub­stan­tial changes to the SAP App Cen­ter designed to improve both the cus­tomer and part­ner expe­ri­ences. ​“With every­thing that is going on right now, we know a dig­i­tal mar­ket­place is real­ly impor­tant to our cus­tomers,” said Anne Yi, gen­er­al man­ag­er of the SAP App Center.

Giv­ing SAP Part­ners a Path to Go-to-Market 

One of the biggest announce­ments to come out of the 2020 SAP Glob­al Part­ner Sum­mit was the intro­duc­tion of the SAP Part­ner Solu­tion Pro­gres­sion frame­work. Mov­ing for­ward, the soft­ware com­pa­ny will give third-par­ty part­ners a frame­work and pro­gres­sion to ver­i­fy the appli­ca­tions they have devel­oped to inte­grate with SAP solutions.

“When you look at the cre­ation of soft­ware, it is a life cycle,” said Tom Roberts, senior vice pres­i­dent of the glob­al part­ner orga­ni­za­tion at SAP. ​“We designed this pro­gres­sion because we want SAP part­ners to con­tin­ue to bet­ter and invest in their intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty by cre­at­ing solu­tions that help customers.”

This pro­gres­sion begins at the Val­i­dat­ed lev­el, where appli­ca­tions are show­cased on the SAP App Cen­ter. After that, part­ners can move to the Spot­light lev­el, where their appli­ca­tions receive addi­tion­al go-to-mar­ket sup­port from SAP. The third lev­el of this cri­te­ria is the SAP Endorsed App lev­el, an invi­ta­tion-only pro­gram first announced at the 2020 SAP Glob­al Part­ner Summit. 

SAP choos­es the best of the best on the App Cen­ter, focus­ing on solu­tions that are bring­ing con­tin­ued suc­cess to cus­tomers. Endorsed Apps must go through a series of tests and pre­mi­um cer­ti­fi­ca­tions, far beyond SAP’s stan­dard appli­ca­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. These solu­tions have their code ana­lyzed by the SAP Inte­gra­tion and Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Cen­ter. Final­ly, part­ner solu­tions that reach the pin­na­cle of the pro­gres­sion are invit­ed to be an SAP Solu­tion Exten­sion. These appli­ca­tions join the ranks of only a few part­ner apps that are sold and sup­port­ed by SAP. 

2020 Refresh of the SAP App Center 

In addi­tion to these new devel­op­ments, the SAP App Cen­ter recent­ly got a revamp, com­plete with new updates and enhance­ments to the site. Yi empha­sized that SAP made these changes to improve both the cus­tomer and part­ner expe­ri­ence on the SAP App Cen­ter, and to help cus­tomers find the per­fect part­ner solu­tion. One of the biggest inno­va­tions to the SAP App Cen­ter is the improved search function.

“One of the key things about a dig­i­tal mar­ket­place is search,” Yi said. ​“We lis­tened to our cus­tomers and part­ners, and worked dili­gent­ly to improve our search capabilities.”

Users can now search by the dif­fer­ent SAP tech­nolo­gies their appli­ca­tions will inte­grate with, an application’s val­i­da­tion sta­tus with SAP, and the cer­ti­fi­ca­tions an appli­ca­tion possesses.

A lot of work also went into the prod­uct pages. Yi said that the pages now con­tain more infor­ma­tion, images, and videos. Each page clear­ly spells out what SAP solu­tions the appli­ca­tion can inte­grate with and the var­i­ous fea­tures and com­po­nents includ­ed in each app. Accord­ing to Yi, these page fea­tures help cus­tomers choose an appli­ca­tion with­out hav­ing to inter­act with a sales­per­son, speed­ing up the sales timeline.“Customers just want to be able to dis­cov­er and do the research on their own,” she said. ​“A lot of cus­tomers want to do research online with­out any human interaction.”

On the part­ner side of things, the SAP App Cen­ter now fea­tures a part­ner cock­pit. This home­page for part­ners gives them vital infor­ma­tion about the solu­tions they have on the SAP App Cen­ter. It has a dash­board show­ing met­rics such as page vis­its and search terms. They can now see poten­tial sales oppor­tu­ni­ties and cus­tomer infor­ma­tion, which allows them to con­vert these oppor­tu­ni­ties into actu­al deals.

The SAP App Cen­ter: Pow­ered by SAP Technology

Dur­ing this over­haul, SAP decid­ed to rebuild the SAP App Cen­ter on its own tech­nol­o­gy. Cur­rent­ly, the cen­ter runs on SAP Cloud Plat­form on the SAP Com­merce Cloud and fea­tures the SAP Spar­ta­cus user inter­face. The part­ner cock­pit is built on the SAP Cloud Plat­form Exten­sion Fac­to­ry, also known as Kyma run­time.“When you come to the SAP App Cen­ter, you know it’s run­ning on SAP,” Yi said.

SAP also migrat­ed the SAP App Cen­ter to SAP Hybris, which is the same solu­tion the com­pa­ny uses to man­age the SAP Store. Though there are few oppor­tu­ni­ties for SAP cus­tomers to make direct pur­chas­es on the SAP App Cen­ter at the moment, it’s clear this move is to pre­pare for a day when these types of e‑commerce trans­ac­tions will become the norm. 

“Ulti­mate­ly, you’ll be able to do one search and look across all SAP solu­tions and part­ner solu­tions,” Roberts said. While this search func­tion­al­i­ty isn’t avail­able yet, Roberts described this tran­si­tion as the ​“first step” toward mak­ing that con­nect­ed search a reality.

A Green Bonus for SAP App Cen­ter Customers

As SAP brings changes to the SAP App Cen­ter and inte­grates it with the SAP Store, the com­pa­ny is using the two plat­forms to dri­ve its com­mit­ment to fight cli­mate change. In an effort to plant 5 mil­lion trees by 2025, the soft­ware com­pa­ny will begin plant­i­ng one tree for any pur­chase made on the SAP Store and the SAP App Center. 

“Cus­tomers will ben­e­fit from a stream­lined order-to-pro­vi­sion­ing expe­ri­ence while we’ll also plant a tree on their behalf,” SAP CEO Chris­t­ian Klein said in a recent press release. ​“This under­lines our com­mit­ment to tack­le envi­ron­men­tal chal­lenges with nature-based solutions.”

Read our cov­er­age of all the changes SAP is com­mit­ting to relat­ed to part­ner and cus­tomer sup­port at the 2020 SAP Part­ner Summit.