Dive Brief:
- SAP’s partner-driven ERP migration push is paying off, according to the company’s CEO and Chairman Christian Klein. The software company saw mid-market channel sales grow 1.5 times faster than direct business last year, the executive said Thursday during a Q4 2025 earnings call.
- “It isn’t just the world's largest enterprises that rely on SAP,” said Klein. “We expanded in the mid-market, and we are winning new customers through our partner-first strategy and the significant expansion of our reseller ecosystem.”
- Amid efforts to migrate existing customers to SAP’s cloud-based ERP ahead of next year’s Dec. 31 end of support deadline for its ERP Central Component suite, channel sales helped corral more than 3,000 new customers last year, Klein said.
Dive Insight:
SAP retooled its partner program a year ago as part of a broader business model realignment, pouring more than $2 billion into a transformation designed to speed migrations to its cloud-based S/4HANA ERP and add AI capabilities to the expansive software suite.
The company’s PartnerEdge program makeover expanded on the strategy, adding partner competencies and specializations tied to cloud and AI expertise, while incentivizing outcomes-based customer engagements rather than pure sales.
“The program, now 100% cloud-focused, is designed to help recognize and elevate partners that are ready to support customers in the cloud-powered AI economy,” SAP said in the January 2025 announcement.
In the months leading up to the change, infrastructure services provider Kyndryl expanded its SAP practice, building on its own ERP migration journey. The company has since added depth to its ERP migration consulting services, rolling out the Kyndryl Data Transformation Suite for SAP Solutions toolkit last April and agentic AI migration assistants built in collaboration with Nova Intelligence in early January.
Kyndryl established an SAP Center of Excellence staffed with over 500 SAP technical experts on Jan. 27, expanding its partnership with the ERP giant.
“Our experts are guiding customers in applying AI to break through SAP modernization barriers, accelerate transformation and build resilient digital foundations that position them for long-term growth," Michael Bradshaw, Kyndryl’s global practice leader for applications, data and AI, said in the announcement.
Other partners have followed suit.
Managed infrastructure services provider DXC Technology embarked on an internal SAP migration following the RISE with SAP roadmap and became a validated partner at the start of the year. The company also partnered with SAP to develop AI use cases for the SAP Business Technology Platform data cloud in Europe this month.
EY and DXC were two partners that launched SAP migration service packages last spring.
Thursday’s positive partner news was partially overshadowed by an SAP earnings miss that shook investor confidence. The company reported a 25% year-over-year increase in current cloud backlog — a measure of contracted, non-cancelable cloud revenue in the 12-month pipeline. That was one percentage point lower than SAP had forecast for the final quarter of the 2025 fiscal year.
“This is a more pronounced slowdown than what we had anticipated and more than the slight deceleration we guided to at the beginning of last year,” CFO Dominik Asam said during the call. “This outcome reflects a deal mix weighted toward larger transformations, many of which include longer ramp periods or flexible structuring.”
