Live from Las Vegas, Software AG’s Innovation World 2015 has broken the company’s record for the number of attendees.
Over 500 people descended on Vegas for the show, with 208 partner attendees from 73 companies.
CBR lists all the key Partner Summit news day one had to offer.
1. Technology ready to impact
Eric Duffaut, Chief Customer Officer at Software AG, delivered a keynote on the company’s plans for 2016.
He said: "This company has never been more open to partnerships than today. We are just at the beginning of this journey. 2015 has just been an appetiser of what 2016 is going to be like."
Duffaut also said that today’s technology is ready to make a serious impact, but reminded those in the audience that Software AG is just an enabler.
For 2016, he said the evolution of the firm’s partner strategy will be based on partner engagement models.
The "White Space" vertical will be rolled out in Q1 2016 and companies will be asked to identify gaps in the industry that can lead to positive digital transformation outcomes.
Duffaut said: "We are not capable to address this market opportunity by ourselves. At the end of the day it is all about value creation."
2. Education platform
Susanne Schmitt, director global partner education at Software AG, unveiled Software AG’s partner education roadmap for 2016 with a whole new platform and learning approach.
Set to be launched in Q1 next year, she described the product as a one-stop-shop for training services offered through e-learning, live webinar sessions, classroom and remote training, certification.
The platform also includes learning maps: learning maps consent of a combination of courses that could be e-learnings, classroom trainings or live webinar sessions.
Schmitt was also the only woman to step on the Partners Summit stage, alongside 15 men.
3. Partner business portal
The company previewed its new partner business portal which has been simplified.
Felix Schlueter, director global partner marketing at Software AGT, said the product offers accelerators, portfolio applications (including ARIS cloud), and other resources to partners.
Under accelerators, Software AG has also included an education tab to help partner businesses understand how to use the company’s ecosystem of offerings to help them in the digital era.
The company has also created and registered new logos for its solutions. All Software AG’s products – Alfabet, Aris cloud, webmethods, and others – haven been designed in light blue capital letters to create uniformity across partners.
4. Go-To-Market solutions
Addressing the fact that 90% of sales people fail to connect buyer challenges to their solutions, Eddie McDaid, SVP for industries and solutions at Software AG, spoke on how to build go-to-market (GTM) solutions.
He unveiled how Software AG organises itself and said that the company has a team of industry and domain expertise made out of evangelists, industry practitioners, use case definitions, demand generation initiatives and sales/partner enablement.
Most importantly, McDaid said the lungs of the operations are the marketing team. Marketing is done with product marketers, industry GTM initiatives, digital marketplace, marketing campaigns, whitepapers, video blogs, events and public relations.
He said: "We have become extremely organised in terms of how we build these solutions with our partners."
5. Change in mindset
Labelled as one of the biggest barriers to most technologies adoption, Jan Foitzik, VP global partner portfolio and programs at Software AG, said tghe mindset of partners are changing.
This will help to conquer new opportunities and by 2018, the company has goals to have in place a self-sufficient partner ecosystem fuelled by a new business strategy.
He said that the company now wants to sell, build and implement solutions to drive business.
This has also led Software AG to unveil Digital Marketplace, an online hub designed to help customers respond faster to the accelerating digitisation of the global economy.
