“We need our partners to drive innovation and adoption here”: Ashley McGibbon at SAP on why they are leaning more on partners

Ashley McGibbon the company’s ANZ chief partner officer discusses why partners have better relationships than the vendor.

Software giant SAP has aligned themselves more closely with partners over the past few years, as they have relationships and knowledge that the vendor admittedly doesn’t.

Speaking to CRN Australia, Ashley McGibbon chief partner officer at SAP ANZ said the relationships that their partners have from a business perspective in their key customers, clients and mid-market is “hard for SAP to scale”.

“They've just got more resources, they've got more people on the ground,” McGibbon stated.

“They're at the customer’s side every single day because they're helping them drive their IT programs and strategies more broadly.

“But they're also providing strategic business advisory as well, and that's something that's hard for SAP to scale and do, because we are ultimately a software company.”

McGibbon explained that SAP’s focus is on delivering innovation in business processes, in business, AI and in data.

"We need our partners to drive that innovation and adoption here for us in ANZ, which is why globally, the strategy has shifted for us to be much more closely aligned, more than ever before,” she said.

“It's a step change that I've noticed over my time here.”

Partner-led territories

For the past few years, the software company has been hyper-focused on building relationships with partners.

In April 2025, SAP launched their partner-led territories program in Australia, the second country to adopt it after New Zealand.

This program was launched in the APJ region where the intent is for SAP to be 100 percent indirect in particular regions.

McGibbon noted one of the challenges with partner-led territory was in the front-end discovery and pre-sales segment.

“Our partners had not been used to doing some of the heavy lifting in the front end discovery and pre sales piece,” she said.

“We've had to focus on building partner maturity from a demand generation perspective, and from a pre-sales perspective as well.”

SAP have implemented a number of initiatives to support their partners, including the release of their new demo environment, Demo 2.0.

“Giving them more extensive resources to be able to demo to customers,” she said.

“We focus heavily on presales validation, which is where partners come in, demo to us, and we'll coach them before they go out and present to a customer. We've had a number of partners come in and do that this year, which has been great.”

McGibbon highlighted that partner maturity has been another challenge for SAP.

“We're asking them to do more to support us scaling into that corporate segment,” she said.

“They've had to sort of change some of the things that they've done in the past. We've invested more development funds in them to be able to achieve that as well and [create] lots of different programs around helping them build demand.”

McGibbon noted that boards are becoming more risk averse when it comes to transformation.

“Which again, is why we have built up that community with the advisory partners,” she said.

“Our system integrators need to get to know this community as well, given that they're so involved in the business case development and upfront discussions with those with those customers.”

The chief partner officer explained that through this new Partner-Led Territories, SAP has gone through a cultural shift.

“Especially in the corporate space, from selling direct to selling through the channel, and that has been well received this year,” she said.

“It's something that's been in place for a couple of years, but that's quite cemented ANZ, which is being noticed and seen by partners, which is why we've got so many more wanting to join the program.”

Growth in tech partners

Looking back at 2025, McGibbon was pleased with SAP’s technology partnerships growing, through their Business Data Cloud product.

SAP has partnered with several technology vendors including Databricks, Snowflake, Google and Microsoft Fabric.

“What SAP is giving customers flexibility and choice to work in the data marketplace that they have invested in and can leverage,” she said.

“What that's allowing our customers to do for the very first time is to access SAP, mission critical treasure trove of data in an easy way alongside the other data in their organisation.”

McGibbon added, “That’s part of our strategy our partners are most excited about, because often they have practices in those other tech spaces as well.

“They can drive a better outcome for customers, because they've got skill sets in Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, and so they're able to bring a holistic data solution together for our customers, leveraging the accessibility of business data cloud,” she ended.