Kathy Gibson reports from Sage Future for Partners in Amsterdam – ERP software partners are under immense pressure to change the way they do business.
“We are at an inflexion point in the mid-market,” says Pieter Bensch, MD and executive vice-president: UK, Ireland and APAC. “Our customers are not buying software anymore. They are buying a better businesses, with better visibility, more control and faster decisions.
“The question we all need to face: what happens to the value in your business when implementation becomes 10-, 20-, 30-times faster? And where will the next source of value come from?”
He stresses that the focus should be on value – not revenue.
“Your answer will define where your business goes next,” Bensch says. “Value won’t be defined by the hours you take to deploy software, but by the solutions you enable.”
Customers are exposed to AI and today want value from their core systems sooner, with less complexity and technology that does more of the work
The value that partners bring is in their deep knowledge of different industries, markets and regulatory environments. “Technology is global but judgement trust and expertise is local,” Bensch says. “And the partners are what makes it local.”
In the mid-market, particularly, there is a new competitive landscape. “In the new world of AI-native players, the game has changed. Customers are being promised solutions that are faster to buy, faster to get started and faster to get value.”
Indeed, customers are using AI to do their own discovery before their first contact with a solution partner – so partners can’t continue to use the same consulting techniques that have been in play since the 1980s, Bensch says.
“Customers compare us to what they believe is possible, and to the fastest possible solution they know about.”
Partners need to stress the strength they bring to the party: the thousands of customers, the decades of domain expertise, the proven solutions and global partner ecosystem. “The challenge for partners is to move fast enough; to sell what is repeatable; and to deliver on what they promise.”
AI, and the rapid adoption of agentic AI, is quickly changing where the value sits, Bensch explains. The system of record is no longer the core of the business, but an enabler that helps to drive value closer to the business outcomes.
With AI and automation able to eliminate many of the time-consuming tasks associated with migration – data entry, data validation, data configuration, report scheduling and data processing – more time is freed up for judgement, expertise and outcomes.
In this environment, faster implementation changes the economics of the partner’s business, Bensch adds. But reducing the time to perform implementation and professional services doesn’t automatically translate into lost revenue, he says.
“If you look at it differently, it is a capacity dividend – faster delivery releases capacity to reinvest in growth and should result in more customers, more migrations and new services. And thus more revenue.”
He acknowledges that this transition is not easy for partners. “You are managing todays commitment while building tomorrow’s model. And new recurring revenue takes time to build.”
He says Sage is committed to walking the journey with partners, and helping to make the transition work. “There has to be a clear runway that we can build together.
“Partners have built their expertise over many years,” Bensch says. “Cloud and AI give them a new way to scale what they know. AI lets us turn this into repeatable services, with agents built by partners working in the industry they know. And these services can scale to multiple customers and markets.”