In 1972, five entrepreneurs embarked on a mission to create enterprise software that integrated all business processes and enabled data processing in real-time. They called their company SAP, and little did they know that they were creating a German software giant that is now the largest tech corporation in Europe.
Five decades later, SAP now serves more than 400,000 customers globally and is a de facto leader in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. While the company is a force to reckon with among Fortune 500 companies, it also saw the opportunity to serve startups and scaleups.
If Apple and Microsoft are American dreams then SAP is a great example of the European dream and in order to help more entrepreneurs achieve that dream, the company launched a new programme called GROW with SAP for scaleups.
GROW with SAP for scaleups
While there are many programmes and bootcamps designed to help startups and scaleups, GROW with SAP for scaleups is all about helping scaleups focus on their business plan or product vision without having to worry about business processes. Romain Gauthier, Global Vice President, GROW with SAP for Scaleups, says the idea came to them during a meeting with a ride-hailing company in Estonia.
Gauthier says the meeting was a culture shock for them and made them realise they didn’t speak the same language. As a company with decades of experience working with larger corporations, SAP was accustomed to setting KPIs known to complex corporations and not scaleups.
“It was kind of like an aha moment, where we realised we have the tech, we have the knowledge, we know how we could help scaleups run their businesses, but we just didn’t speak the same language,” he adds.
This moment led to GROW with SAP for scaleups, a programme designed to bring the best of SAP as a large enterprise with a lot of customers and meet the needs of scaleups or as Gauthier calls it, speak their language.
At first, GROW with SAP for scaleups was aimed primarily at scaleups in France, the UK, and the Netherlands. However, the programme has expanded from a side idea to a global opportunity in just five years and has helped over 560 companies from industries like SaaS, fintech, AI companies, gigafactories, electric charging companies, payments, healthcare, and even foodtech.
Ecosystem player
The primary aim of GROW with SAP for scaleups is to help scaleups in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the US become a successful enterprise. However, it also serves the purpose of demystifying this belief that SAP is expensive to start with. Gauthier says they do this through two pillars of the programme: Run ON SAP and Hypergrowth Hub.
He describes the first pillar, Run with SAP, as a tailored tech solution designed to help scaleups at different stages of their lifecycle. These are solutions pre-configured for companies in the hypergrowth stage so they can focus on growth, competitive advantage, product marketing and leverage best practices and prepackaged processes in areas like finance, HR, or administrative ERP.
“We talked to a lot of founders, we talked to VCs and clearly what was important for them was to be able to cover the basic functions,” adds Gauthier.
Interestingly, SAP has created a solution with an MVP approach that can go live within four weeks. This package includes the best practices, sub-processes, and processes that they see everywhere for their customers. In other words, Run with SAP is a shortcut to accounting, core finance, procurement, project management, reporting and other business processes.
The second pillar, Gauthier says, is to leverage SAP as the largest tech leader in Europe. He describes it as speaking to scaleups, understanding what’s important for them, and opening its ecosystem for customer matchmaking or integration with its product. The fact is that GROW with SAP for scaleups is a programme that brings international scale and thought leadership to the table but leaves mentoring, which includes accelerator, incubator, to others.
For years, European startups and scaleups have turned to American businesses for reaching scale and internationalisation. With GROW with SAP for scaleups, the German is stamping its authority as a true ecosystem player for European scaleups and one with significant might behind it. By working with scaleups who have raised either Series A or Series B, SAP makes its intent clear and has helped over 560 scaleups, most of them coming from Europe and US.
Helping scaleups GROW
After speaking to Gauthier, I found his description of how SAP classifies the scaleups joining its programme the most interesting. He says they look at companies either as capital intensive ones with large barriers to entry (Energy Tech, Healthtech) or as tech companies (SaaS, Fintech, etc.), which includes the likes of SaaS scaleups. When it comes to capital intensive scaleups, SAP likens them to those in the field of health tech, energy tech, manufacturing, retail as well as those with physical businesses.
“There are so many companies changing the game in the energy transition and we play a big role in this,” he adds.
Historically, SAP has been a leader in helping companies build and run big operations and it is leveraging that expertise to support companies in the field of manufacturing, a prime example being manufacturing of batteries. It also has a strong foothold in fintech, whether it is in the UK or the Netherlands or Luxembourg, SAP is playing a pivotal role across a wide array of industries.
Can you grow? Gauthier says this question haunts scaleups at various stages, and SAP is helping them grow with its business expertise and scale. From research and product development, building operations to helping companies launch their second product, GROW with SAP for scaleups is there every step of the way while also helping companies meet the necessary due diligence.
The programme is also designed to help scaleups improve their reporting or build competitive advantage to disrupt big companies in the industry. He adds that startups and scaleups in Europe are looking for companies who can help them multiply and for scaleups, SAP is that multiplier – able to help companies evolve from selling from B2B to B2B2B companies.
Installed player
Since it’s been only five years since SAP began its vision to expand beyond Fortune 500 companies and help scaleups, Gauthier sees it as an incubated market for them. As a result, he says GROW with SAP for scaleups is not different from any scaleup it helps to grow. Even though the programme is growing at around 90 per cent year-over-year, he doesn’t see a need to set any concrete objective just yet.
However, there is one clear goal here – to become an installed player. In other words, GROW with SAP for scaleups aims to become the go-to player in the ecosystem globally and it aims to do that with global expansion. In addition to expanding to markets like India, Middle East, South East Asia and Africa, SAP sees it as an opportunity to create a community where every scaleup part of the programme can interconnect with others.
“To have a truly global ecosystem and create a community throughout SAP is very critical,” he argues.
How would that community work? Gauthier paints a picture where a US-based scaleup or one in the West Coast can connect with a Dutch company or an Indian scaleup and they all can discuss how they can scale to China. In this case, all these scaleups would be leveraging SAP’s global footprint to not compete but collaborate and scale themselves and one area where this might work the best is AI, which is also a huge area of investment for SAP.
SAP has already integrated French AI leader Mistral AI and it is uniquely positioned to not just implement or develop AI but bring it to the actual processes. Even though AI is the most hyped tech, its rapid use has been among consumers, and Gauthier says SAP could change that as a company known for providing processes and helping run processes within companies.
This different procedure, Gauthier argues, will help SAP and its scaleup community to leverage AI in ways known only to most well-oiled organisations. “Our vision is to bring AI towards that value chain, not only towards the end user in a silo, but towards that process,” he quips, and adds that, “I see things in the future is that we are going to partner more and more with scaleups because they are game changers.”
For scaleups, Gauthier says the real growth will come from bringing the ecosystem together and creating a momentum around AI and with SAP, he says it is a real possibility that such a thing can be done on a European level.
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