ASUG secured the first inter­view with Muham­mad Alam, the new pres­i­dent and chief prod­uct offi­cer for Intel­li­gent Spend and Busi­ness Net­work at SAP. Alam’s glob­al scope includes mis­sion-crit­i­cal, cloud-based sourc­ing; pro­cure­ment; exter­nal work­force man­age­ment; trav­el; and expense man­age­ment solu­tions, name­ly the SAP Ari­ba, SAP Field­glass, and SAP Con­cur solu­tions; as well as the SAP Busi­ness Net­work, which includes Ari­ba Net­work, SAP Logis­tics Busi­ness Net­work, and SAP Asset Intel­li­gence Network.

Alam dis­cussed his cur­rent pri­or­i­ties, what he’s heard from exist­ing and prospec­tive SAP cus­tomers, what he needs from ASUG mem­bers, and how his orga­ni­za­tion will serve the ASUG mis­sion to help indi­vid­u­als and orga­ni­za­tions achieve the most val­ue from tech­nol­o­gy investments.

This is an edit­ed ver­sion of our conversation.

Q. On behalf of ASUG mem­bers, wel­come and thanks for the oppor­tu­ni­ty to spend time with you. Let’s get start­ed. You’ve spent the last sev­er­al years in lead­er­ship posi­tions at Microsoft. What prompt­ed you to shift to SAP?

A. It was a real­ly hard deci­sion. It took me months to decide whether I want­ed to come to SAP or not. The sin­gle biggest rea­son why I came to SAP was the oppor­tu­ni­ty and the abil­i­ty for SAP, as an orga­ni­za­tion, to do some­thing that could fun­da­men­tal­ly trans­form how busi­ness appli­ca­tions work in the future.

If you step back and think about busi­ness appli­ca­tions — out­side of going through some tran­si­tions from green screen to being client-based, to being brows­er-based, to maybe hav­ing some bet­ter, pret­ti­er screens — they haven’t real­ly been trans­formed. For exam­ple, a pur­chase-order screen now looks like a pur­chase order in the green screen. But if you think about where the world is going and where the world is now ready to go, the con­cept of con­nect­ing to your trad­ing part­ners in a real-time, col­lab­o­ra­tive way — one that could be safe and allows peo­ple to have con­trol over their data — would real­ly improve how col­lab­o­ra­tion works across the val­ue chain. I think that has phe­nom­e­nal impli­ca­tions on how busi­ness appli­ca­tions will work. That’s the sin­gle biggest rea­son I came to SAP.

If I look around, there’s no oth­er com­pa­ny in the world that has the depth in busi­ness appli­ca­tions that SAP has, the com­plex­i­ty of busi­ness process­es, and the class of cus­tomers that run SAP. No oth­er com­pa­ny real­ly knows the busi­ness appli­ca­tion space as well. Then, if we mar­ry that con­cept with what we’re doing with the SAP Busi­ness Net­work, that could be fun­da­men­tal­ly transformative.

These rea­sons — cou­pled with SAP lead­er­ship, their ener­gy, and their intel­lect — remind­ed me of how I felt dur­ing the ear­ly years at Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadel­la, when the com­pa­ny start­ed its trans­for­ma­tion. So that was very attractive.

A final point is the SAP cul­ture. If the peo­ple weren’t col­lab­o­ra­tive and respect­ful and try­ing to do the right thing; if there wasn’t a cus­tomer-first atti­tude, then none of this would be pos­si­ble. If you’re able to real­ly trans­form some­thing that the indus­try hasn’t seen, you do it with a set of lead­ers who are com­mit­ted and pas­sion­ate about mak­ing that change in an envi­ron­ment that’s actu­al­ly fun to work in, with high­ly tal­ent­ed folks. That’s what I’ve found here at SAP.

Q. What lessons and skills are you bring­ing from Microsoft that you’ll apply at SAP?

A. One is obvi­ous­ly trans­for­ma­tion. I’m ear­ly in my SAP career, but if you look at my expe­ri­ence at Microsoft and what the com­pa­ny had gone through over the last few years under Satya’s lead­er­ship, it’s a holis­tic trans­for­ma­tion. One that obvi­ous­ly begins with the prod­ucts, look­ing at how and why the prod­ucts are built, who the prod­ucts are built for and how we engage with cus­tomers and part­ners — from how the engi­neer­ing teams engage to how our sup­port teams engage — as well as how we engage with the exter­nal world. So that trans­for­ma­tion expe­ri­ence is one that I feel will be real­ly rel­e­vant here as we look to the next chap­ter of what SAP can become.

All of that comes with a strong focus on fun­da­men­tals. We want to make sure, from a prod­uct per­spec­tive, that the user expe­ri­ence is some­thing cus­tomers love. It’s about mak­ing sure the fea­tures are intu­itive and add val­ue to what users are try­ing to do. Pro­vid­ing UX reli­a­bil­i­ty and avail­abil­i­ty, as well as mak­ing sure the prod­ucts are inte­grat­ed, ensure that the val­ue they get from our solu­tion is expo­nen­tial­ly charged.

It’s about mak­ing sure we’re com­pli­ant, mak­ing sure the prod­ucts are avail­able in the geog­ra­phy where the cus­tomers are look­ing for them, and doing that in a way that’s cus­tomer obsessed. My expe­ri­ence with Microsoft’s trans­for­ma­tion is extreme­ly rel­e­vant here — the focus on fun­da­men­tals, upon which every­thing else rests.

Then, relent­less inno­va­tion. At Microsoft, that’s one thing we did real­ly well — dri­ving prod­uct inno­va­tion for the sake of ensur­ing we can add val­ue for our cus­tomers and help them through what­ev­er chal­lenges they faced. That relent­less quest to guar­an­tee that we can con­tin­ue mak­ing our prod­ucts bet­ter, more intel­li­gent, and more val­ue-based for our cus­tomers is some­thing I hope to bring to the table here at SAP.

Q. Could you define the scope of your responsibilities?

A. I’m respon­si­ble for all prod­uct engi­neer­ing glob­al­ly for Intel­li­gent Spend and Busi­ness Net­work. This includes all prod­uct man­age­ment, engi­neer­ing, and design teams that focus on build­ing prod­ucts for pro­cure­ment solu­tions in SAP Ari­ba and SAP S/4, our trav­el and expense solu­tions in SAP Con­cur, our exter­nal work­force solu­tions in SAP Field­glass, as well as the work we’re doing in the SAP Busi­ness Net­work with Ari­ba Net­work, Asset Intel­li­gence Net­work, and Logis­tics Busi­ness Network.

Q. Please share your views on the strengths of the fol­low­ing solu­tions: SAP Ari­ba, SAP Con­cur, and SAP Fieldglass.

A. I believe SAP pro­vides indus­try-lead­ing solu­tions that are mar­ket lead­ers in each cat­e­go­ry of spend: Ari­ba for indirect/​direct main­te­nance, repair, and oper­a­tions; Field­glass for ser­vices and exter­nal work­force; Con­cur for trav­el and expense; and S/4 for direct spend. Con­cur remains the world’s most wide­ly adopt­ed cor­po­rate trav­el and expense soft­ware solu­tion, and accord­ing to IDC, has 51.5% glob­al mar­ket share. SAP main­tains the largest share of the world­wide pro­cure­ment appli­ca­tions soft­ware mar­ket; again, accord­ing to IDC, it has a glob­al mar­ket share of 32.8% — more than the next 11 ven­dors com­bined. With a 99% cus­tomer reten­tion rate, SAP Field­glass solu­tions are con­sid­ered indus­try-lead­ing for ven­dor man­age­ment sys­tems. These are also indus­try-lead­ing for con­tin­gent work­force man­age­ment, as con­sid­ered by ana­lyst firms, includ­ing Ardent Part­ners, Ever­est Group, and Gart­ner. Plus, we offer the SAP Busi­ness Net­work, a cloud solu­tion that con­nects more than eight mil­lion busi­ness­es across the sup­ply chain, from buy­ers and sup­pli­ers, to man­u­fac­tur­ers, logis­tics providers, and ser­vice providers. With SAP Busi­ness Net­work, we are build­ing the foun­da­tion for glob­al com­merce in the new net­worked economy.

With this, SAP will fun­da­men­tal­ly change how busi­ness appli­ca­tions will work in the future. SAP Busi­ness Net­work will enable cus­tomers to extend beyond their four walls to man­age col­lab­o­ra­tions with trad­ing part­ners in near real time to ele­vate the val­ue each can pro­vide to the other.

Q. What fur­ther devel­op­ments and improve­ments can SAP cus­tomers and prospec­tive cus­tomers expect in each of those offerings?

A. We are focused on a few top pri­or­i­ties. I’ll out­line three of them. First, we are work­ing to enhance the over­all user expe­ri­ence, not just the UI, but real­ly cre­at­ing a rich, end-to-end user expe­ri­ence for the dif­fer­ent per­sonas that engage with our cloud solutions.

Sec­ond, we are con­tin­u­ing to improve the intel­li­gence and automa­tion embed­ded with­in the end-to-end process. Third, we are con­tin­u­ing our work to improve inte­gra­tion across the Intel­li­gent Spend and Busi­ness Net­work port­fo­lio, as well as inte­gra­tion with oth­er SAP solu­tions such as S/4HANA, Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning, and Suc­cess­Fac­tors, to sup­port end-to-end source-to-pay, design-to-oper­ate, and hire-to-retire processes.

Q. Busi­ness Net­work is an area where our mem­bers would like greater under­stand­ing and greater clar­i­ty on what the future holds. Can you address those pieces of the puzzle?

A. Let’s think about it in a super sim­ple fash­ion. The world of busi­ness appli­ca­tions, in the world of ERP, has large­ly focused on mak­ing process­es more effi­cient inter­nal­ly, with­in the walls of an orga­ni­za­tion. This allowed orga­ni­za­tions to add a ton of val­ue to the orga­ni­za­tion itself by being able to exe­cute in an inte­grat­ed, seam­less fash­ion across process­es that his­tor­i­cal­ly were pret­ty siloed. There was a lot of val­ue there.

But the next change step comes when you can go past these orga­ni­za­tion­al bound­aries and can con­nect with your trad­ing part­ners. These could be part­ners that you buy direct mate­ri­als or ser­vices from, or they could do con­tract man­u­fac­tur­ing for you — essen­tial­ly any and all kinds of engage­ments. How do you cre­ate that envi­ron­ment, that net­work, essen­tial­ly, where you and your trad­ing part­ners can exchange the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion in a real-time fash­ion, and then be able to gen­er­ate insights and effi­cien­cies? His­tor­i­cal­ly, this kind of exchange required either peer-to-peer cus­tom inte­gra­tions or a time-lagged way to com­mu­ni­cate, or worse — no com­mu­ni­ca­tion among trad­ing part­ners, each work­ing in their own silo and hop­ing every­thing else works.

It’s impor­tant to focus on how to effi­cient­ly con­nect with tier-one part­ners, but today’s busi­ness net­work real­ly needs to go beyond that. It needs to go into the sup­ply chain and the val­ue chain, with vis­i­bil­i­ty that goes beyond just the tier-one trad­ing part­ners net­work, which I think is expo­nen­tial­ly hard­er to do. Being able to know what risks real­ly reside in your entire val­ue chain; being able to dri­ve a lev­el of sup­ply chain col­lab­o­ra­tion, a lev­el of vis­i­bil­i­ty, a lev­el of trans­paren­cy into who does what. And not just for you, but for your tier one, tier two, tier three, and so forth, until you get to the raw materials.

I’m excit­ed about SAP Busi­ness Net­work because of its abil­i­ty to extend beyond the four walls of an orga­ni­za­tion to enable true col­lab­o­ra­tion across the val­ue chain. The set of use cas­es that can apply are as broad and as wide as the set of busi­ness process­es an orga­ni­za­tion runs. It could be in how you plan, man­u­fac­ture, source, and/​or inter­act with your cus­tomers, or even how you man­age your finances with work­ing cap­i­tal part­ner­ships, with banks and finan­cial institutions.

Who in the world can bring about a Busi­ness Net­work like that to fruition? I believe there’s real­ly only one orga­ni­za­tion that can pull it off and that’s SAP, because we work with some of the largest orga­ni­za­tions in the world, pro­vid­ing a breadth of busi­ness appli­ca­tions that help peo­ple man­age some of the most com­plex busi­ness processes.

Q. In ear­ly cus­tomer con­ver­sa­tions, what have you heard are the top needs, chal­lenges, and opportunities?

A. There have been some very clear, con­sis­tent feed­back and requests from our cus­tomers, even in an unpre­dictable world. Top of mind for our cus­tomers is ensur­ing busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity, espe­cial­ly because of the volatil­i­ty of the world we live in and the agili­ty required to address any num­ber of require­ments, such as being able to source mate­ri­als they’re sud­den­ly chal­lenged to find. Ensur­ing sup­ply-chain resilien­cy while try­ing to take cost out of the sup­ply chain is issue num­ber one. Cre­at­ing more resilien­cy in the sup­ply chain starts with hav­ing the right vis­i­bil­i­ty and trans­paren­cy. This allows us to find alter­na­tive sources when there are risks to ele­ments that com­pa­nies depend on, and to plan col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly with their trad­ing part­ners in a way that allows them future resiliency.

We’re also see­ing an increas­ing need to ensure com­pli­ance with new and emerg­ing gov­ern­men­tal reg­u­la­tions. States around the world are going to engage more in cre­at­ing that resilien­cy as well, for indus­tries that are impor­tant to them, and cer­tain­ly in the cloud. There’s also the new sup­ply-chain law in Ger­many. And the U.S. gov­ern­ment just announced a new sup­ply chain endeav­or. We can expect to see more reg­u­la­tion. These reg­u­la­tions will have impli­ca­tions on the data res­i­den­cy expec­ta­tions of our cus­tomers, as they want the data to be in-coun­try for all crit­i­cal process­es, if not all processes.

Sus­tain­abil­i­ty is also a top pri­or­i­ty for most orga­ni­za­tions, mak­ing sure they can be a respon­si­ble orga­ni­za­tion that con­tributes to the sus­tain­abil­i­ty goals of the world. That starts with being able to have vis­i­bil­i­ty into what their emis­sions are, and what their cur­rent car­bon foot­prints are, from what they’re sourc­ing, to what they’re spend­ing on, and what they’re build­ing. Orga­ni­za­tions want to have con­fi­dence in their com­mit­ments to their cus­tomers and in the val­ue chain. They want the abil­i­ty to demon­strate that they are, indeed, a respon­si­ble orga­ni­za­tion that works in a sus­tain­able, humane way across their val­ue chain.

Anoth­er emerg­ing trend we see is flex­i­bil­i­ty in the work­force. Orga­ni­za­tions need to be able to add staff with the right skills, at the right time, and with the low­est lev­el of risk. We see some cus­tomers expe­ri­enc­ing labor short­ages; they want to be able to tap into con­tin­gent labor. We see a lot of project-dri­ven work that needs exter­nal work­ers with the right skill set at the right time to do the job.

These are some of the top con­cerns we hear from our cus­tomers. This is where we’re focused on ensur­ing we can deliv­er solu­tions for them.

Q. Giv­en all of that, what are your top pri­or­i­ties for the first six months and the first year?

A. As you would expect, in my first few weeks here, I focused on under­stand­ing the prod­uct and our prod­uct strat­e­gy. I’ve had count­less hours of prod­uct deep dives. I’ve spent time meet­ing the team, under­stand­ing from their point of view what’s work­ing well and what could be done dif­fer­ent­ly to cre­ate more effi­cien­cies. I’ve been con­nect­ing with our cus­tomers to under­stand how they feel about our prod­ucts, what’s top of mind for them, and what they expect of SAP.

One thing I want to make sure that the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty under­stands is this change — my being here — is not a sig­nal of a change in strat­e­gy for us in Intel­li­gent Spend and Busi­ness Net­work. As a com­pa­ny, we believe we have a com­pelling strat­e­gy and a com­pelling set of prod­ucts that are mar­ket-lead­ing from a share per­spec­tive — prod­ucts that a lot of large cus­tomers depend on dai­ly. We’ll con­tin­ue to dri­ve our core strate­gies and core pri­or­i­ties, which include con­tin­u­ous improve­ment to the user expe­ri­ence, not just the look and feel, but more­over, with a focus on the work­flow and on bring­ing more intu­itive­ness to our prod­ucts to pro­vide the mod­ern, con­sumer-grade expe­ri­ence users expect. That will remain a theme you’ll see us focus on and invest in a lot.

Anoth­er theme is this: How do we real­ly infuse and apply AI to the mas­sive amount of data our cus­tomers have, to then pro­vide insights and intel­li­gence in the con­text of their busi­ness appli­ca­tions — not just insights for the sake of insights, but insights that will help the end user? You’ll see us con­tin­ue to invest a lot in AI across the full spec­trum of Intel­li­gent Spend.

And you’ll see us empha­size what I call fun­da­men­tals: com­pli­ance, secu­ri­ty, and place­ment — ensur­ing we’re in the right regions, offer­ing reli­able prod­ucts and performance.

Q. Can the cus­tomer com­mu­ni­ty expect more accel­er­at­ed devel­op­ments in the areas you’ve talked about, and if so, how?

A. Absolute­ly. We are focused on con­tin­u­ing to devel­op SAP Busi­ness Net­work to infuse it into the busi­ness process­es that our cus­tomers use. Cus­tomers should also expect us to exe­cute with urgency on improv­ing the user expe­ri­ence and deliv­er­ing the intel­li­gence and insights they can use to dri­ve their busi­ness­es for­ward. At SAP, cus­tomers depend on us to run mis­sion-crit­i­cal process­es. With the data that that gen­er­ates — with the right secu­ri­ty and pri­va­cy con­trols — we can apply AI to those process­es, mak­ing them more valu­able and giv­ing cus­tomers the insights, ana­lyt­ics, and rec­om­men­da­tions for the next best action to take. That will help cus­tomers trans­form their operations.

Q. If you had one mes­sage or two mes­sages specif­i­cal­ly for ASUG mem­bers, where the ASUG mis­sion is to help our mem­bers obtain the best use and val­ue from their invest­ment in SAP tech­nol­o­gy, what would you tell them?

A. I have one ask and then I’ll make one com­mit­ment. The ask is this: keep the feed­back com­ing. Our num­ber-one pri­or­i­ty is ensur­ing that we’re build­ing solu­tions that can help our cus­tomers with the chal­lenges they’re fac­ing today, that can help them pre­pare for future growth. We aim to stay ground­ed in what our cus­tomers are seeking.

My com­mit­ment is that if cus­tomers keep the feed­back com­ing, I’ll make sure that every sin­gle engi­neer­ing hour we spend will focus on deliv­er­ing what cus­tomers need to improve their businesses.