The SAP ecosystem is changing. While the company still maintains the traditional types of partners who resell SAP products, there is a global ecosystem that includes partners who are either strategic service providers or technology partners.

Mitchell Kick, global VP, head of Strategy & Programs, SAP Strategic Ecosystems at SAP SE, joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during SAP Sapphire 2016 to discuss the company’s dynamic strategic partnerships.

Furrier asked Kick how he sees the “chess board” of technology. “Names like Apple, Uber, Facebook, some of these are not your grandfather’s SAP partners,” Kick asserted. He feels that SAP is working with partners in new ways to co-innovate new solutions that provide advantages to the customer in the digital age.

The new face of data for marketers

SAP is partnering with Facebook to take social data and put it together with Hybris and Customer Engagement and Commerce (CEC) types of solutions that bring Facebook data and enterprise data in a manageable tool. Marketers can now do one-to-one marketing. This solution provides marketers with more insightful targeting.

“Over the course of the last year, there have been a number of interesting pilot examples. SAP is creating a solution that will be packaged as a turnkey [solution],” said Kick.

Sharing the ‘Apple’

The SAP partnership with Apple is also a way for the company to offer partners and customers more opportunities to transform their businesses.

“When you think about something like an Apple [partnership], the beauty is not only are we developing these beautiful industry applications that are going to be in targeted industries … but we are also developing the Software Developer Kit, basically taking that into the HANA Cloud Platform, providing a compelling reason to leverage these beautiful interfaces and tools to take advantage of native capabilities on the apple devices,” he remarked.

Partnerships have become as crucial as capabilities

According to Kick, customers need a whole solution, and he believes the partnership role is not only to implement software but to integrate and to extend it, as well as to create micro services on top of it. He views the digital transformation in terms of “what difference does it make.” He listed three differences: changing the customer experience fundamentally, providing a difference in how value is delivered and seeing a difference in business models.

In essence, he stated when you combine these technology trends, there must be a way to make money and grow opportunity for companies.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE