This is according to enterprise software and digital solutions provider , which also lists AI, digital skills and closer partnerships as trends that will impact the channel.

, SAP’s partner  and ecosystems lead for MEA, says the main role that technology plays in business is pushing customers to involve partners  in strategic discussions to ensure proper guidance from the start. Effective partnerships across sectors, from government to non-profits, are essential to address industry challenges, she adds.

, MD of , concurs and notes the era of fragmented systems is ending.

She adds that unified partner ecosystems are now vital for streamlining operations, boosting collaboration and delivering value to customers while driving efficiency.

51·çÁ÷also identifies data and security as the top issues for organisations in 2025, with companies aware that disparate data can skew analytics and rising cyber security threats pose increasing challenges.

“Disparate data stored in different places is typically drawn up into an analytics platform, as a result, losing its contextual relevance. Actual analytics then become skewed, impacting outputs,” says Pillay.

The second biggest issue facing customers and partners is security, she continues. “Increased and more sophisticated levels of malicious intent are negatively impacting our industry at large.”

JSE-listed ICT firm says AI-driven security, zero trust models and human-centric security will be top of mind for business leaders, cyber security C-suite decision-makers, CISOs and cyber security services providers.

In addition to adopting advanced, AI-enabled threat detection systems, the company advocates a “trust no one, verify everything” architecture to protect sensitive data in hybrid work environments.

The company agrees with the notion that human error is a major cause of cyber security attacks and incidents. It underlines the need for ongoing employee training and fostering a culture of vigilance to reduce risks.

According to BCX, it understands the unique challenges African businesses face, from limited budgets to regulatory compliance and the persistent cyber security skills gap.

AI-driven operations

Taute believes AI can transform operations by enhancing decision-making through predictive insights, optimising resource allocation and uncovering growth opportunities. Partners offering AI-driven solutions will be key to meeting customer demand for automation and machine learning capabilities, Taute adds.

“By integrating AI into enablement platforms and operational workflows, partners can better anticipate customer needs, optimise resource allocation and uncover growth opportunities. Beyond operational benefits, AI also presents a significant sales opportunity for partners. As customers increasingly look for solutions incorporating AI-driven automation, predictive analytics and machine learning capabilities, tech partners can position themselves as key providers of these innovative technologies.”

The Westcon-Comstor Southern African executive adds that specialisation is becoming a key differentiator in the channel, with customers demanding tailored solutions that address industry-specific challenges.

“Partners with deep expertise in verticals such as healthcare, finance or manufacturing will stand out by delivering bespoke technology stacks and compliance-ready solutions. Distributors that support this trend by enabling multi-vendor solutions and providing specialised training will empower their partners to capture new market opportunities and thrive in niche segments. People enablement will be a serious determiner for success in 2025,” says Taute.

, GM and VP of , warns that AI moves quickly and can leave behind companies that cannot or will not adapt.

°Â´Ç´Ç±ô±ô±đ˛âĚý held recently and said according to the Dell 2024 Innovation Catalyst study, 31% of South African respondents admit they’re struggling to keep up with the pace of disruption. “The whole industry is evolving at pace, and that creates a lot of tension within businesses. Most people understand it will have an impact.”

Balancing costs

’s highlights the challenge for companies to balance IT costs with modernisation, especially with rising expenses and AI advancements.

“Cloud repatriation, driven by cost concerns and regulatory compliance, is gaining momentum, with businesses opting for a mix of private and public cloud solutions. As businesses face increasing complexity, the cloud FinOps market is growing, with skills and resources in demand. AI adoption will require clear use cases and evidence of long-term business benefits, with prebuilt systems enabling faster implementation.

“With South African businesses under significant pressure to manage and reduce IT costs, company leaders are finding themselves in a tough spot. They need to balance these rising cost pressures with the urgent need to modernise, all while keeping a lid on operational complexity. These pressures will reach a tipping point in 2025, thanks to some unexpected cost spikes and advancements in generative AI. Because of this, many businesses are taking a hard look at their long-term IT strategies, trying to figure out how to handle the rising costs of their virtualised workloads, support both current and future needs, and streamline IT operations in an increasingly complex environment.”

Cloud repatriation is taking centre stage in 2025 as businesses reassess their public cloud strategies.

According to Ntuli, escalating costs and the need for better budget management are driving this trend. Many organisations are now opting for a strategic mix of private and public cloud solutions to balance expenses and manage resources effectively.

“As a result, FinOps is becoming essential. Projected to hit almost $40 billion by 2034, the burgeoning cloud FinOps market underscores the need for skills and resources in this area,” he says.

In his overview of issues that will continue to impact the channel, , VP, data and analytics – Middle East, Turkey and Africa and MD South Africa at IDC, lists several significant external influences, including inflation, economy and global trends.

Walker says these trends include consumer discretionary spend, COVID amortisation at enterprises, the impact of AI, import tariffs/duties and the level of technical support that will trigger more activity in the channel and will escalate the level of competition.

This article first appeared here:

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that worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% to reach $591.8-billion in 2023, outpacing the 18.8% growth forecast for 2022.

However, says Cameron Beveridge, Regional Director for Southern Africa at SAP, moving to cloud environments requires effective change management to ensure digital transformation initiatives reach their objectives. “There is palpable excitement around cloud services in African markets, but there are still questions around how to effectively migrate and how to orchestrate multiple cloud solutions once the migration is complete. And while it’s true that one of the main benefits of cloud services is the ability to fail quickly without incurring huge cost or time overruns, you really don’t want your cloud initiative to fail due to poor change management.”

Studies have highlighted the importance of effective change management to the success of digital transformation initiatives. McKinsey data indicates that worldwide. This is partly due to poor change management, of which are clear successes.

Methodology, Partners reduce perils of Cloud Migrations

Brent Flint, Head of Enterprise Applications at Dimension Data, believes part of the answer to effective change management during cloud transformation projects rests on an effective methodology. “Migrating core business processes from on-premise environments to the cloud requires a proven methodology to accelerate the transition and reduce associated risks. A repeatable methodology that incorporates automation to ensure aspects such as data integrity, for example, can ease data migration and speed up the time-to-value.”

51·çÁ÷introduced RISE with 51·çÁ÷in 2021 to help companies get started with 51·çÁ÷cloud solutions, accelerate cloud adoption, and simplify the process of shifting core business processes to cloud environments. “Companies undertaking digital transformation initiatives that could benefit from RISE need to ensure their implementation partners are accredited and have the skills capacity to support the project throughout,” explains Flint.

Beveridge adds that companies that successfully leverage the insight, skills and experience of partner organisations can reduce risk and enhance the impact and business outcomes of their transformation efforts. “Companies are realising that cloud adoption is not a once-off event: it requires near-continuous refinement and evolution to deliver business value. This makes the role of expert partners, who have developed experience with specific use cases of cloud technologies and can guide organisations in their adoption of cloud solutions, critical to their success.”

Keys to cloud success

Understanding how and where the journey to the cloud should start remains among the biggest obstacles to the digital transformation efforts of African organisations.

Lauren Wortmann, Vice President: Applications at Dimension Data, says there’s still some resistance to the cloud among organisations limiting the success of cloud transformation projects. “Cloud adoption is a business-critical activity, but the optimal starting point is not always clear. Many organisations and their IT teams also acknowledge that the shift to cloud is coming, but there’s internal resistance due to fear about how it will affect the business and existing IT skills.”

Arguably the most important factor when developing a cloud strategy is defining a clear business case for cloud adoption. “Cloud is not just about cost efficiency,” says Wortmann. “It’s about modernising the business and its core processes, unlocking new opportunities, enhancing capabilities and achieving broader digital transformation. For this to be successful, there needs to be massive buy-in from the business at every layer, from the boardroom to the IT department and every end-user.”

The era of large on-premise deployments was typified by big winners and big losers, but the new era of cloud has changed the dynamic entirely. Flint explains: “In the old days, if you defined the scope of the project correctly upfront and quoted accurately, you could deliver a successful implementation that delivered new capabilities and was profitable to the technology provider and their implementation partner. The era of cloud requires a change of mindset. Today, tech vendors and partner organisations need to strive for near-continuous innovation, with KPIs around unlocking additional business value from existing technologies built into managed services contracts. It puts the onus on partners to unlock features and benefits from software, with the goal of ongoing value generation.”

Wortmann adds that companies should be smart when choosing how they start their cloud journey. “Aspects such as Human Capital Management are perfect starting points for cloud adoption, with solutions like 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors offering a high-value, low-risk way to test how cloud migration plays out in the organisation. Larger, more critical business processes such as core finance, sales and logistics carry high degrees of risk due to fears of disruption and business continuity in the event of downtime.”

Flint believes one of the keys to successful cloud adoption is simplification. “Organisations should work with their partners to understand their application landscape and identify opportunities for simplification. Reducing customisation can also keep things simple while driving costs down. Partners need to avoid customisation to limit technical debt and achieve quicker time to value. Adopting best-practice standards for core business processes opens the door to incremental innovation which can suit cloud-first companies better.”

Beveridge says this requires a change in mindset to how digital transformation initiatives are approached, both by customers and partners. “The most successful tech partners will be the ones that develop strong commercial models that meet customers’ expectations of what value digital transformation projects should deliver. However, there’s no blueprint for how this should work. Organisations should work closely with tech providers and implementation partners to develop strong business use cases and change management programmes to ensure each initiative delivers business value and unlocks new capabilities, efficiencies and opportunities for growth.”

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The economic situation is forcing us all to think outside the box, define new business models and new processes, and accelerate innovation and digital transformation so we can operate in a much more dynamic and agile fashion.

Intelligent Enterprises Need to Be Integrated Enterprises

In response to the business requirements for increased agility, savvy organizations are bringing on more and more solutions and innovation at a pace that’s faster than any time in their histories. And why is that? Because intelligent enterprises put innovation and technology to work in as many parts and processes of their businesses as possible. And intelligent enterprises know that business agility requires that all those parts and processes work together. They need to be integrated.

Together, 51·çÁ÷and our partners — including global service partners as well as implementation, reseller, and software partners — are bringing this innovation, technology, and integration to businesses around the world. This article examines what our customers are facing as they look forward, and explores how providing connected business technology and improving our partner experience can help us better deliver on customer needs.

Customers Struggle with Cloud Complexity

As organizations shift to the cloud, decision-making has become more decentralized and individual lines of business are able to deploy point solutions without IT oversight, which creates silos of data that span fragmented business process flows. The statistics below emphasize the that organizations face today:

• Large enterprises are already using more than 200 software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications
• The unique number of SaaS applications in use per company is up approximately 30% year over year
• Duplicate subscriptions have increased by 80%
• Orphaned application subscriptions are up almost 100%
• Enterprise companies must manage an average of 21,580 people-to-application connections
• Sixty percent of the SaaS stack is changing every two years

All of this has also led to increase security risks and costs:

• Twenty-seven percent of cloud computing budget is
• Nearly two-thirds of organizations see
• Security breaches are on the increase; the FBI reported that compared to the previous quarter

In fact, that the goal of making operational enhancements and modernizing their IT systems was to improve information flow. So it is no wonder that IT is overtaxed and searching for a way to help ensure systems and data remain holistic, secure, and connected.

Business Process Extension and Integration Is Critical

Managing data has always been a critical part of our collaboration with customers. Over time, as the 51·çÁ÷portfolio has grown, the data our solutions manage has also increased. Today, .

That’s a fact that is both humbling and inspiring. It also highlights the opportunity we have with our partners to bring more value to all the different processes and functions within our customers’ businesses.

Because of that reach, a partner building on, integrating with, or extending an 51·çÁ÷platform, has the opportunity to help customers by developing solutions that span hybrid landscapes, connecting lines of business and tapping into data domains from finance, assets, and products to customers, vendors, employees, and more.

Let’s take a closer look at how this works and why this is important.

As described, a critical aspect of the Intelligent Enterprise is the connected nature of its business processes. The more connected and intelligent these processes are, the more responsive, resilient, and efficient an organization can be. 51·çÁ÷has mapped several business processes that reach across traditional domains and system silos to cover the key needs of most companies. These include design to operate, lead to cash, source to pay, and recruit to retire.

These business processes can each be broken down further into specific components or sub-processes.

Looking at the design-to-operate business process – and specifically the supplier management sub-process – there is an opportunity to tap into multiple master data sets to turn data into business value for customers. For example, within supplier management, we have identified four solutions for the 51·çÁ÷offerings:​

• ​Supplier info
• Supplier life cycle
• Supplier performance
• Risk management

Each of these solutions touch various master data domains such as employees, finance, assets, and products – enriching the business process and ultimately increasing the value and impact that each sub-process brings to an organization. Partner extensions, integrations, and applications are essential in driving this value, as they expand 51·çÁ÷offerings and answer unique and critical customer requirements. Today, within the design-to-operate business process, partners are adding value with solutions that extend the core 51·çÁ÷offering, including supplier certification, sustainability ratings, and search and data lookup.

Solutions in these areas can also benefit from tapping into multiple data sources — across cloud, on premise, and hybrid landscapes — providing a holistic supplier view and extending the value they deliver through the design-to-operate business process.

Multiplying that value across all processes and sub-processes shows that the potential for partners and customers is virtually limitless.

Eliminating Complexity

By working even closer with partners, and with commitment to a unified technology platform, 51·çÁ÷can equip our customers to connect their data and business processes to win this battle over fragmentation. We can help customers overcome many of the challenges they face. We can also bring much-needed relief to IT teams, strengthening the value of what we offer while earning the loyalty and trust of our customers. ​

​To achieve this, 51·çÁ÷launched a unifying technology foundation: . The platform includes capabilities and services that connect data, applications, processes, people, and devices. Two central elements of the platform’s capabilities are 51·çÁ÷Integration Suite and 51·çÁ÷Extension Suite, which simplify application integration and extension development, helping partners realize faster time to value with lower development risks.

51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform is supported with a simplified partner experience, demonstrating an increased commitment to partners, which grows as dedication to 51·çÁ÷technology grows, so that 51·çÁ÷and partners can more effectively chart a new path forward together. .

These two topics are important goals and will be the focus of a follow-up article — stay tuned. In the meantime, explore SAP’s software partner program at .

Jagdish Sahasrabudhe is CTO of the Global Partner Organization at SAP.

This article first appeared on the 51·çÁ÷Global News Center.

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World trade . Recent data by the World Bank indicate , pushing the region into its first recession in 25 years and pushing an estimated 40 million people into extreme poverty.

Lacking the deep pockets and extensive social security safety nets of their more developed peers, African nations will need to apply ingenuity and innovation to get the continent’s growth and development back on track.

The response by Africa’s business sector could hold the key to how the continent overcomes the economic challenges ahead, while also building greater resilience and adaptability for future disruptions.

Small steps, not giant leaps

One of the outcomes of the widespread disruption of 2020 is that business leaders and their technology partners are likely to forego large, waterfall projects in favour of taking small, consistent steps on their business transformation journey in 2021.

A strategy of iterative innovation can enable businesses to make consistent improvements to their current products, services and strategies. Iterative innovation implies that businesses enter into a process of continuous improvement, measurement and learning. Successful iterative innovation ensures the business extends its capabilities while navigating any new disruptions or emerging complexities.

Taking an iterative innovation approach means huge, expensive and lengthy digital transformation projects are substituted with a greater number of much smaller, well-defined and clearly measurable projects that focus on delivering quick business value.

However, iterative innovation requires an environment of learning. Analytics should be embedded in business processes to provide real-time visibility over the performance of these innovation projects.

By measuring impact, analyzing insights and applying learnings, business leaders and their technology partners can ensure each iteration builds on what has been achieved, moving the business closer to its goals.

Mobilizing executive support

In the face of the disruption every industry is experiencing – economic, technological, and pandemic related – there is tremendous value in the ability to take constant steps toward greater performance, productivity and innovation. However, this requires bold leadership.

Business leaders need to mobilize and bring functional heads together to actively drive projects to a successful outcome. The very best business transformation projects are built around active participation from executives whose involvement helps ensure the project delivers direct business value and supports organizational strategy.

If organizations wish to thrive in our disruptive digital economy, innovation needs to be driven throughout the company from both IT and business.

What does this mean for their technology partners?

Firstly, technology partners need to engage with their customers at a business level, not a purely technological one. The goal should be quick time-to-value – what can we do to achieve positive business results and drive iterative innovation quickly and consistently?

Secondly, a customer-first strategy is vital. This may mean making small sacrifices in the short term to secure long-term value. For example, instead of insisting on a total digital transformation project, technology partners should seek opportunities for smaller deployments that address specific issues along the business value chain to produce measurable results. As each project builds on the last, bigger business and technology priorities become achievable.

Thirdly, an organizational culture shift is needed. The nature of business is that we all pursue monthly and quarterly targets, and our success is often measured along similar lines. An exceptional sales strategy would balance the need for immediate results with what’s best for the customer in the longer term. This requires that leaders take a long view, and not sacrifice long-term gains for short-term outcomes.

To echo Albert Einstein, we can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. The digital transformation of the African continent is continuing apace. By changing our collective strategy and shifting focus to a more iterative approach to innovation, the continent’s business sector could be well-placed to emerge from our current crisis stronger, more resilient and with greater long-term sustainability.

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