Guest writer and SAP expert Jonakee Chandra interviews SNP Group CEO Jens Amail, whom she knew and worked with when he was a leader at SAP UKI. In this interview, Amail talks to Chandra about his role at SNP, and what’s next for the company as it heads into 2025.
SNP Group has gone from strength to strength under Jens Amail’s leadership but the CEO wears his mantle lightly. With his usual humility, Amail points out to ERP Today that SNP is far from an overnight success story, and that it is founded on a solid combination of category-defining products and a talented team. He also attributes SNP’s reputation to a long history of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, its own caring culture as an employer where employees are valued and nurtured – and a sustained focus on delivering transformation through software.
Jens is amping up emphasis on operational excellence and looks back on 2023 as a “catalyst year”, where those carefully chosen catalysts set in motion a new charter of unbridled growth for SNP. 2024, on the other hand, has been designated as an “elevation year” dominated by three key priorities for SNP – strategic focus on enabling digital transformation and business agility poised to expand the vision of broadening SNP’s market category, create value for customers and partners, and drive international growth through expanded software and partner business in strategic and emerging markets. “The potential of the company was always there – and now it’s unleashed,” Amail remarks.
Indeed, SNP has displayed ambition in targeting some of the biggest markets in the world including the US and UK (“London is my second home”, Amail jokes).
Bluefield: best of both worlds
Our founder was both a technical and marketing genius
When asked about Bluefield, a trademarked name for the selective data migration regime that allows SNP customers to benefit from a lean, new, completely clutter-free system that is still enriched – by virtue of Bluefield technology – with the full historical context of transactional data, Amail says the genesis of this concept goes back to SNP’s founder, Dr. Andreas Schneider-Neureither, “both a technical and a marketing genius” in the CEO’s view.
Brownfield, while inheriting transactional data, is often just a glorified “system upgrade” as opposed to being a holistic transformation, in my view. With Greenfield, on the other hand, customers get a clean slate in the way of a brand new system but one that is completely devoid of historical transaction data and therefore the business context that is derived from it. Bluefield is a game changer with its masterly approach that marries up the advantages of both Greenfield and Brownfield whilst doing away with their drawbacks, without compromising on either the cleanliness afforded by the former or the context afforded by the latter.
“It combines the best of both world,” Amail believes. “You can design your application layer, you can design your clean core as you want it. The benefit from a data perspective is you’re not limited to the master data, but you can get all the transaction data, too.”
SNP customers are equally divided between Greenfield, Brownfield and Bluefield with each claiming roughly a third of the market. “Customers with more cohesive estates and cut-and-dried migration pathways have already taken the plunge and moved,” Amail explains. The ones averse to embarking on transformation are the ones confronted with large, more fragmented estates that have evolved organically into a complex collage of heterogenous (and often outdated) systems, some of them even off maintenance. SNP’s Bluefield is often the panacea for this latter group of risk-averse customers as it comes with the gift of modularity and project parallelization – enabling business to run multiple projects in parallel.
SNP is credited by partners with awarding projects with a “boring go-live – boring is the dream of every CIO”, Amail jokes – and SNP is able to deliver that dream because of rigorous and repeated testing that the migration undergoes. Also, because it’s software-based, the cost is not multiplied by multiplying the testing cycles manifold.
Amail highlighted the benefit of being able to de-couple the system modernization (ECC to RISE) from data migration. By virtue of its modularity, it can be parallelized, [so customers] gain the flexibility of going live at any point and as many times as they need with smaller de-coupled increments.
Agility is intrinsic in SNP’s solutions, and customers are the biggest beneficiaries here with a drastically reduced ‘time to value’ as Bluefield is capable of axing project durations and consequently reducing time, money, and the change management burden.
Also on the offering front is Kyano, launched at SNP’s flagship Transformation World event in Heidelberg in June 2024, which is the last in a long line of succession from SNP’s original solution ‘T-Bone’ (established 2010) through CrystalBridge and the selective data migration methodology BLUEFIELD. Kyano is equipped with an AI-enabled data discovery model, which allows it to unpack the data model of a non-SAP source system.
The key differentiator from other SNP offerings is that Kyano is designed to cater to both SAP and non-SAP systems, the perfect response to a market trend where customers are increasingly availing themselves of what’s popularly known as ‘composable architecture’, combining SAP and non-SAP systems in their enterprise landscape.
“Kyano is part of our strategy to focus more on software compared to services,” Amail confirms. “And the company, the market, our partners – they’re all responding extremely fast to the changes we are implementing.”
Test. Transform. Repeat.
According to Amail, transformations are becoming more frequent as an indirect consequence of macro-economic events, climate change, and the advent of AI to name a few. Businesses often have no choice but to respond by either moving to the Cloud, integrating a new company, divesting a business unit, exiting a region, or carving out a particular country e.g., Russia or China. This is coupled with the ever more urgent push for modernization from SAP itself. Arguably, Kyano allows businesses to move in step with changing times.
What is applaudable is that SNP’s role in this does not end with the transformation. With companies now operating with broader charters, SNP stays tuned through the provision of ongoing analytical services for the transformed customer with a view to assessing how ready they are for the next transformation. That’s why SNP has introduced the ‘SNP Agility Index’, an index derived from insights into customer’s data quality, archiving practices, centralization etc. which combine to provide a reliable indicator of their overall nimbleness and readiness for the next transformation. Today’s businesses must be forever transformation-ready.
A small company, beloved by the biggest brands
Amail is loath to attribute success to a single factor, so when asked about SNP’s single biggest success story over the last five years, he says he’s most proud of the faith that customers have continued to place in SNP, the confidence that’s demonstrated by those customers coming back for more and entering into strategic alliances with SNP. And these are some of the biggest brands from around the world in terms of customers and partners, who have the choice of using any company they want.
“We have massive, market-changing success [with clients]. But for me, what’s more important than this success is we develop strategic and sustainable relationships with customers.”
Amail adds that it’s humbling that this “small company in Heidelberg” now counts some of the biggest names in the industry amongst its customers and partners. He mentions a customer who had approached IBM because the customer wasn’t happy with their existing Systems Integrator and Big Blue would only agree to take on the project in partnership with SNP and that’s a huge endorsement.
In terms of the biggest collaborators in the SNP ecosystem as pushing through customer success, IBM and Accenture stand out as perhaps the strongest SI partners and were sponsors at the Transformation World event. Others of note include Deloitte, EY, Delaware, and PwC.
In terms of technology partners, globally the biggest names are Smartshift, whose custom code remediation is fully integrated into SNP scans; CDQ, who contribute to data quality analysis for business partners and vendors; and certainly also Tricentis.
Rising with SNP
I’ve not met any customer who is not excited about RISE with SAP
Regarding specific clients, SNP has run two projects for Audi simultaneously – one to introduce SAP S/4HANA Finance to establish a central finance system and another to migrate to SAP S/4HANA around maintenance logistics. This was a huge success and it was made possible because SNP’s solution is designed with a degree of modularity that allows a customer’s projects to run in parallel. It is as if in a testament to SNP’s credentials in this space that German automotive manufacturer BMW has entrusted SNP with one of the world’s largest SAP data migration programs as it transforms its entire SAP landscape to S/4HANA by 2030.
What Amail would like to see is customers embracing the huge transformational value of S/4HANA and RISE – but he understands why they are held back.
“I’ve not met any customer who is not excited about RISE with SAP […] But some are concerned about the journey to get there,” as he explains.
Customers believe in the destination that RISE offers but are daunted by the toll it will take on their business in terms of the operational impact of a long-running, resource-hungry, expensive project. This, sadly, is often why RISE is relegated in favor of more pressing business priorities. Customers are worried about the dependencies that figure on the critical path, dependencies such as needing to consolidate instances, improving business data quality, upgrading systems, all of which are projects in themselves and projects that need to be brought to life or indeed put on hold in order to pave the way for a RISE program.
SNP’s platform, technology and toolset can come to the rescue and with ex-SAP leaders like Peter Maier on the SNP Supervisory Board, SNP can equip RISE customers with the right toolsets to analyze their systems and provide a predictable timeline which is often the deal-clincher in changing customers mindsets. With SNP providing the guardrails that make transformations fast, reliable and efficient, customers can focus on shaping that end state.
SNP & a sustainable, AI future
SNP has a culture of trust and transparency
Coming away from the interview, it’s clear people and sustainability are close to Jens Amail’s heart. For the CEO, it’s all about “Winning together”. Success is the sum of everyone’s success and that includes employees, customers and partners. There is faith in the leadership, in the executive board, employees feel more valued and everyone has greater visibility.
“There is a culture of trust and transparency,” Amail says, and this is reflected in the Average Commitment Index soaring from 60% to an all-time high of 68% at SNP (the absolute best practice is said to be somewhere around 65%).
Also, for a company that’s increasing its headcount by 33% from its current 1500 to 2000 over the next three years, AI is having anything but an adverse impact on SNP’s workforce. When companies around the world are laying off people from jobs that have been outsourced to AI, Amail jokes “Give them my telephone number”. In fact it’s not just the number of employees on SNP’s payroll that is going up, it’s also the number of locations around the world where SNP exists. SNP continues to expand its reach across the world with new offices in Dubai, Paris and Sao Paulo.
One of the biggest levers for growth is being able to scale up the services organization in order to provide greater heft to partner enablement. SNP currently has a small services footprint in India of around 50 employees and Amail would like to take this number to somewhere around 400.
SNP also demonstrates a wholehearted commitment to sustainability, something that’s reflected in its internal policies, its general outlook as indeed in its software solutions. For example, SNP internal policies incentivize public transport travel for its employees.
Amail is particularly proud of SNP’s decision to celebrate its 30th anniversary not by gifting each employee a pair of SNP-branded sneakers, which might have been a popular choice, but one that would have involved shipping goods around the world to each employee. Instead, it gave away around 1% of the company by giving each employee the gift of 30 company shares.
Sustainability at SNP is also reflected in the everyday outcomes the company delivers for its customers, the most notable being the staggering reduction in size of Pfizer’s data from its original 75 terabytes to just 5.5 terabytes post-transformation. A 93% reduction in data storage is not just an eye-popping headline for SNP but also a fabulous gift to the planet, given that data is an expensive commodity to store and one that entails substantive environmental impact in terms of the electricity and water consumption at Cloud data centers.
In ways like this, SNP is preparing a better world for the future. And keeping eyes on the road ahead, there is plenty of evidence that SNP is innovating faster than most with its game-changing software suite CrystalBridge and its selective data migration approach BLUEFIELD and now Kyano. In a rapidly evolving tech world where the next transformation is frequently just around the corner, SNP is responding to that need for speed with its targeted and modular data transformation software.
“Everything is now more relevant than ever as transformation is happening more often,” as Amail concludes. “Look at climate change, the world population, the development of AI. Change has never happened this fast – and will never happen this slowly.”
