With the recent launch of GROW with SAP, a new bun­dled offer­ing struc­tured to help mid­size cus­tomers adopt cloud ERP, SAP aims to meet the fastest-grow­ing com­pa­nies of today where they are–and where they’ll soon be – in their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion journeys.

Com­bin­ing SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pub­lic edi­tion with indus­try best prac­tices and embed­ded AI and automa­tion capa­bil­i­ties, GROW with SAP was designed to empha­size speed, pre­dictabil­i­ty, and con­tin­u­ous inno­va­tion, three areas rel­e­vant to the busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy needs of mid­mar­ket com­pa­nies. By uti­liz­ing GROW, which also pro­vides access to the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) devel­op­ment and inte­gra­tion envi­ron­ment, and the low code/​no code SAP Build appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment plat­form, such com­pa­nies can seek to define their own apps and process­es in a cloud-native way.

In a recent inter­view, Eric van Rossum, Chief Mar­ket­ing and Solu­tions Offi­cer, SAP Cloud ERP, dis­cussed GROW, how it fits into and fur­thers the larg­er SAP Cloud ERP strat­e­gy, and why dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion requires a ​“mind­set change.” 

This inter­view has been edit­ed and condensed.

Q. In your view, what was the ini­tial busi­ness dri­ver behind GROW with SAP? 

A. I’d like to place this in the ASUG con­text first, because ASUG is to a large degree a com­mu­ni­ty around the installed base. GROW rep­re­sents a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. When you look at how SAP wants to grow — on a macro lev­el, from our strat­e­gy per­spec­tive around S/4HANA — we have two motions. We have the motion of tak­ing our installed base, which we’ve engaged with for a long time, to the cloud. For this mar­ket — where cus­tomers already have an exist­ing SAP asset — to help them with the move to the cloud, we launched RISE with SAP two years ago. RISE is about, at the pace of the jour­ney of our installed base, being able to lever­age what cus­tomers already have and move to the cloud. 

Now, what we real­ized is that [RISE] did­n’t always res­onate with net-new cus­tomers. That’s what GROW is about. GROW is for net-new cus­tomers com­ing into the SAP fam­i­ly and cus­tomers in the mid­mar­ket space, which calls for dif­fer­ent mes­sag­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. At the same time, it’s also built exclu­sive­ly around a pub­lic cloud offer­ing. Cus­tomers that are start­ing green­field can go straight to [SAP S/4HANA Cloud,] pub­lic edi­tion. In going after net-new and mid-mar­ket com­pa­nies pur­su­ing their next tra­jec­to­ry of growth, GROW is about how we bring those com­pa­nies into the SAP family.

Q. In offer­ing net-new and mid­mar­ket cus­tomers cloud-native ERP soft­ware, as well as with adop­tion ser­vices and learn­ing resources, GROW seems struc­tured to serve as an intro­duc­tion to SAP soft­ware but also to the larg­er SAP network.

A. Com­pa­nies that already know SAP are inter­act­ing in a com­mu­ni­ty, through ASUG. We can also cre­ate a net­work around cus­tomers that don’t have that his­to­ry with SAP. There’s ben­e­fit to exist­ing cus­tomers learn­ing from exist­ing cus­tomers, but there’s also val­ue in build­ing a net-new com­mu­ni­ty togeth­er with ASUG. How can we cre­ate a unique area for those types of cus­tomers to get togeth­er and share expe­ri­ences of what they’re going through with SAP for the first time? 

Q. In recent years, SAP has increas­ing­ly embraced the real­i­ty that its cus­tomers, espe­cial­ly those at an inter­me­di­ate state of their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion jour­neys, use hybrid tech­nol­o­gy land­scapes and require inte­gra­tion between SAP and non-SAP systems. 

A. We believe in mod­u­lar archi­tec­ture. I’ve been with SAP for 23 years. In the begin­ning, our val­ue propo­si­tion was a mono­lith­ic, end-to-end process. ​“Run every­thing from SAP, and the world will be great.” That’s just not real­is­tic. I’d love every­one to run SAP end-to-end, but — from a con­sump­tion per­spec­tive — speed and agili­ty are becom­ing much greater dri­vers of val­ue than breadth of func­tion. It would be great if you could do every­thing, from an end-to-end per­spec­tive, but if it takes you five years to imple­ment it, that’s not what cus­tomers are expect­ing nowadays. 

The [cus­tomers] that GROW tar­gets are in an expo­nen­tial growth phase or going to their next stage, there­fore speed and pre­dictabil­i­ty are extreme­ly impor­tant to them. When you look at GROW, speed and pre­dictabil­i­ty are at the core of what we’re try­ing to do. We’re tak­ing an out-of-the-box, what-you-see-is-what-you-get, fit-to-stan­dard approach, and pro­vid­ing the tools and ser­vices to help dri­ve that. GROW helps com­pa­nies go live fast; they can go live with GROW in six to eight weeks. 

The phi­los­o­phy is dif­fer­ent. It’s not, ​“Here’s a blank sheet of paper. Write down every­thing you need.” It’s more, ​“Here are the best prac­tices based on our 50 years of expe­ri­ence.” We know what com­pa­nies need and we want to help them imple­ment the solu­tions they need quick­ly, which we can do with our acti­va­tion ser­vices. On-premis­es acti­va­tion, for exam­ple, was focused on get­ting every­thing right as soon as the cus­tomer went live. It was a moment in time as opposed to a con­tin­u­ous jour­ney. With GROW, we release func­tion­al­i­ty every six months. It’s about going live quick­ly, with a min­i­mal scope, and then incre­men­tal­ly adding to it. 

A cus­tomer in the solar ener­gy space recent­ly said, ​“As we grow, we can grow with SAP.” The main rea­son they select­ed GROW was because, every six months, new func­tion­al­i­ty is released that can help expand their busi­ness. That’s the mind­set we’re going after with GROW. 

Q. What you’re describ­ing, though GROW is built around the core ERP sys­tem of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pub­lic edi­tion, sounds like a method­ol­o­gy for engag­ing with SAP on a go-for­ward basis. GROW presents a path­way for con­tin­u­ous inno­va­tion with SAP, rather than one implementation.

A. I’d go even fur­ther — it becomes a par­a­digm shift, a change in mind­set. We need to move ERP imple­men­ta­tion as a whole into the mind­set of a con­tin­u­ous jour­ney. More specif­i­cal­ly, to my point about start­ing small with a min­i­mal viable scope, GROW allows you to go live quick­er, and then you’re con­tin­u­ous­ly adding to that scope. There’s this ques­tion, which I think is also applic­a­ble for most of the installed base: How do we shift to this cloud mind­set? How do we look at inno­va­tion as being continuous?

It starts with a mind­set shift around how your ERP should be imple­ment­ed. Cloud is a jour­ney, not a moment in time. Part of that shift, also, is about mov­ing from a fit-to-gap to a fit-to-stan­dard approach. Cus­tomers will ask us to meet 100 [busi­ness] require­ments. Eighty of those require­ments are not dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing, and so we advise them to just accept best prac­tices: the oth­er 20 require­ments, where the cus­tomer is unique or there’s com­pet­i­tive dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, is where SAP’s Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form and prod­ucts like SAP Build come in, to lever­age exten­si­bil­i­ty in a mod­u­lar approach.

Q. With GROW with SAP lever­ag­ing best prac­tices that SAP has estab­lished through its 50-year his­to­ry, in what ways does GROW reflect and rep­re­sent a cer­tain matu­ri­ty on the SAP side, around Cloud ERP trans­for­ma­tion in particular? 

A. We want to lever­age the strength of SAP, of being the com­pa­ny that invent­ed ERP, devel­oped best prac­tices, and can help busi­ness­es scale glob­al­ly in a com­pli­ant way. On the oth­er hand, what we don’t want to bring from our lega­cy is com­plex­i­ty, which reduces speed and agili­ty. With GROW, we have best prac­tices and an out-of-the-box, fit-to-stan­dard approach. At the same time, that is root­ed in 50 years of knowl­edge of how you run a glob­al com­pa­ny. In going after com­pa­nies that have not worked with SAP before, that’s exact­ly why we cre­at­ed a brand iden­ti­ty around GROW, to mes­sage that cor­rect­ly so that cus­tomers under­stand the ben­e­fits of this offer­ing for their business.

Q. How would you com­pare GROW cus­tomers to those ASUG mem­bers with­in SAP’s exist­ing cus­tomer base, in terms of their over­ar­ch­ing goals?

A. It’s about how com­pa­nies are mov­ing to the cloud. GROW is very much tai­lored toward com­pa­nies that are start­ing fresh. Although the installed base is going to go on a mul­ti-step jour­ney to the cloud, the par­a­digm shift and the mind­set change is exact­ly the same. They want to lever­age an asset they already have, so they’ll go on a dif­fer­ent jour­ney, but the mind­set and the end goal is the same. So is the idea that they can lever­age BTP for exten­si­bil­i­ty, and that they want a clean­er core. To get back to the stan­dard process­es, SAP Sig­navio is includ­ed in RISE with SAP. When our installed base uses Sig­navio, it’s all about get­ting to a clean core, which requires exten­si­bil­i­ty; that’s an approach dis­tinct from start­ing fresh with a growth in mind and build­ing from the ground up. But the mind­set and the prin­ci­ples are exact­ly the same, in terms of what you want to achieve. At the end of the day, com­pa­nies want to get to the cloud, to achieve con­tin­u­ous inno­va­tion, to be able to con­tin­u­ous­ly upgrade, and to be agile.

Q. Last ques­tion. Broad­ly, how would you char­ac­ter­ize the oppor­tu­ni­ties for mid­mar­ket com­pa­nies to achieve busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion through GROW with SAP and through adopt­ing cloud ERP? 

A. If I look at why com­pa­nies are choos­ing GROW, the num­ber one rea­son is because they want to run with indus­try best prac­tices. You want to know that, as you grow, you can lever­age SAP’s 50 years of his­to­ry for their main process­es, so you can run and scale at a glob­al lev­el. There’s also great func­tion­al­i­ty from a busi­ness mod­el per­spec­tive. For grow­ing com­pa­nies that are dri­ving new busi­ness mod­els or eval­u­at­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty goals, they can grow with indus­try best prac­tices that sup­port future busi­ness mod­els. And, again, you can scale. You can grow with­out lim­its. As you go into a new coun­try, you need a sys­tem that is tax-com­pli­ant and local­ized. As you’re doing acqui­si­tions, you need to quick­ly bring them into your system. 

There’s also con­fi­dence and pre­dictabil­i­ty. These com­pa­nies have less time, aren’t com­fort­able with risk, and less bud­get to go to the cloud than a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar orga­ni­za­tion. Com­pa­nies can go bank­rupt if they don’t deploy ERP cor­rect­ly. That’s why we include acti­va­tion ser­vices in our fixed price offers: ​“We’re going to deploy this, it will cost you this, and you will go live in this amount of time.” You have to get it right in the mid-mar­ket space, because there’s less time, less mar­gin, and less room for error. One com­pa­ny we work with in Italy, has 50 employ­ees; they had gone from 15 employ­ees to 50 in a two-year peri­od. They’d dou­bled their rev­enue and employ­ee count every year. The pace of change is so quick that you need best prac­tices to get start­ed. You need a plat­form where you can sup­port new busi­ness mod­els. You need a plat­form where you can grow with­out lim­its — but you also need to do it in a pre­dictable way, at a pre­dictable price, where it doesn’t break the bank.