The mission of partner certification is clear: It provides guidance and assurance for customers navigating a large network of partners with an array of diverse offerings. Certification is especially important as customers increasingly demand digital transformation offerings and seek partners with up-to-date cloud certifications.
Prioritizing the different types of certifications available can be complex, but certification has become a critical element for partners in growing their businesses. With proper certification, whether it’s for talent, applications, services, operations, or projects, partners demonstrate their commitment to delivering excellence for customers. They also differentiate themselves from the competition, which makes them poised to compete and expand business through their expert knowledge on best practices and current skills. Additionally, certification provides partners with internal benefits, like higher employee satisfaction and career growth support.
Certify Talent First – Everything Else Second
Certification for talent is fundamental before anything else. Whether the business objective is implementation, consulting services, or application development, the process must always start with the individuals knowing what they’re doing.
Talent certification is also a validation of successful knowledge transfer, and it helps bring peace of mind for customers when they’re looking to do specific implementations or transformations. Often, however, vendors only require a few consultants to be certified, even in massive organizations. While the goal is clear to achieve, having more certified consultants will make for happier customers, ultimately resulting in better business results.
The Cloud Is Coming – Prepare for It
Across industries, “”on-premises”” is still most often the top learning course on the path to certification. With the increasing demand for digital transformation services, this doesn’t bode well for future growth. Without certified cloud consultants, partners won’t be set up for success when digital innovations emerge down the line.
To properly lead customers through cloud transformation, partners should not only have a well-staffed bench of qualified and certified talent, but they should also be fully up to date with the latest best practices around implementation topics and consider productizing some of their own IP as repeatable applications. Again, certification—this time for implementation expertise as a company, or for one’s applications—can help highlight those accomplishments.
Additionally, there are new security concerns from customers in the cloud. Certification of expertise or app-to-app integration ensures that partners and vendors are aligned on best practices, and it decreases the potential for security breaches.
Many of the largest technology vendors have uncovered the opportunity for their partners in the cloud, from job growth to revenue growth. With talent, expertise, and application certification, partners can accelerate transformation in the cloud and create more opportunities for success.
Certification for Sustainable Growth
According to an IDC Vendor Spotlight, sponsored by SAP, only 13% of all partner applications have been certified by vendors. When you consider that 100% of apps in the App Store have been approved by Apple, there’s a lot of improvement that can be made on the enterprise side. Application certification is a dimension that many ecosystems have not yet fully embraced, even though it holds the promise of creating recurring revenue for partners.
Certifying consultants and preparing for the cloud are two fundamental pieces for beginning to build intellectual property (IP) that can be repeated for multiple different customers—the innovation is not a one-off, custom job. It’s replicable. With the advent of online marketplaces and app stores, customers are looking for assurance by their trusted vendor that additional apps integrate seamlessly and have been tested and certified for compatibility.
With application certification, partners will know how to implement the app and integrate it with other software for all future projects. For customers, application certification guarantees that an app works and that it’s safe. Of course, there are different tiers to app certification, but certifying your IP provides added verification for customers as well as more opportunity for sustainable growth.
Ultimately, certification is about making sure the customer knows what they’re getting and guaranteeing that the partner will be able to deliver the desired outcome. When customers feel confident that their business needs will be met—and see their projects delivering on those needs—partners will see return business and greater business growth. With certification, partners create new opportunities for success, both in the near and long term.
ALEXANDRA UHLHERR-MCGHEE is vice president for SAP Integration and Certification Center in the Americas region. She and her team have been working with thousands of SAP software partners over the years, guiding them on app integration best practices, and testing and certifying partner solutions. Having an education in linguistics and translation, she sees many parallels between how companies engage and build trust in corporate ecosystems, and how humans communicate across various cultures.
