‘This is something I ask all partners to invest in’ - SAP global and UKI partner bosses on ecosystem priorities

CRN caught up with Karl Fahrbach and Celine Cazali to hear more about SAP’s channel strategy for 2025

SAP wants its channel partners to “transform” themselves to become SaaS partners as the vendor itself transitions to become a true cloud company.

That is according to Karl Fahrbach, global chief partner officer, and Celine Cazali, UKI chief partner officer at SAP, who sat down with CRN at the vendor’s recent 2025 UK & I Partner Summit at Ascot Racecourse.

Outlining their channel strategy for the year ahead, the duo highlighted how important it is to the SAP business that its partners prioritise a SaaS model.

“The reality is that the partner business within SAP has become more strategic than ever. It really has an impact on the success of the company which relies very much on the ecosystem,” said Fahrbach.

“For the existing partners, I think the biggest opportunity for them to invest, and it’s what we’re enabling them to invest, is to get ready to have a true public cloud SaaS business.

“Many of our partners have been doing the journey like SAP, coming from on-premise to a hybrid world. And now, as the cloud accelerates, they need to continue to transform themselves to be a SaaS partner.

“This is something I ask all partners to invest in.

“Make sure that you're ready to have true SaaS public cloud offerings and practices at work to make sure we can accelerate that business.”

The cloud isn’t the only market changing technology channel firms should have their fingers on the pulse of.

“We’re expanding in AI,” said Cazali.

“For the last three years in the UK we’ve worked on building capacity.

“There’s a huge opportunity for partners to walk the walk and leverage AI.”

Fahrbach added: “We are embedding AI in all our applications to make them work better and drive more value for the end customer.

“So, it's all about adoption and making sure our partners drive that adoption of AI capabilities within our solutions by making AI real.”

Fahrbach believes SAP is currently seeing the biggest momentum in its history in terms of opportunity.

But this also presents challenges, which Fahrbach notes are around scaling.

“Therefore, the challenge will be our scalability and how we can activate the ecosystem to become scalable.

“Internally, we are transforming to become a true cloud company. We are changing processes internally. We need to attract new talent and retrain our people.”