Wishing you a Happy New year and a successfull collaboration.

It is appropriate at the start of a New Year to wish ones business and professional relation “all the best” for the New Year.

Professionally, I would like to wish you for this year, “a better year than 2009”. A nice outlook … at least for lots of companies for whom the last 12 month were not the best ever. Many businesses are actually happy to turn the 2009 page, close the book, and look ahead to 2010 with new aspirations. I have also decided not to look back too much at last year, but just to remember one important aspect of doing business within SAP in 2009: partnerships.

Relations, collaborations, partnerships are key in the “new reality”. This goes beyond pure incidental joint business transactions. Through collaborations and partnerships make the difference.Therefore SAP BeLux changed its yearly partner award at the end of 2009. We awarded 10 partners a “collaboration award”. In the past years, partners were nominated or awarded based on being the best in one specific category (award for midmarket, award for strategic solutions, award for customer satisfaction…). At the end of 2009 we looked at a combination of 5 criteria and looked for a clear answer on the main question: “how did the partner contributed to growing the SAP business”. The 5 criteria SAP BeLux used to determine “successful collaboration” were:1. new customers : obviously this is the key measure to define growth in Small and Medium Enterprises business. On the other hand, SAP equally targets ‘new names’ in the Large Enterprises segment2. extending the SAP solution footprint : within the installed customer base, SAP basically challenges its partners to invest in new, strategic solutions like Business User and CFO solutions, Netweaver Innovation solutions, Sustainability solutions,… and to position these at the customers. Therefore partners are requested to invest in demo systems, knowledge and education of their consultants.3. developing new markets, new industry sectors: even in a tough economic climate the focus industries like Financial Services sector and the Public Sector remain growth markets which require specific expertise and approaches together with SAP partners. 4. creating satisfied reference customers through high quality implementation projects. Customer success is the most valuable return for SAP and its partners. Equally real customer testimonials, success stories, reference calls,… are important way to convince prospects to invest in SAP.5. investment in sales and business development capacity: in summary SAP relies on transparent collaboration with partners to plan and develop joint opportunities .

Accenture, Alti Cernum, BSB, Callataÿ & Wouters, CSC, Delaware, Deloitte, IBM, Intensum and Thinking Solutions are the 10 companies I would like to congratulate with their collaboration award.

I am looking forward to extend this collaboration in 2010 and build a successful year together with the complete SAP eco-system.