#44 Pieter Van Heck: How To Keep Your Finger On the Pulse of a Partnership

Pieter Van Heck is the Global Strategic Partner Manager for SAP at Dynatrace, which is a close partner of SAP.  Part of Pieter’s job is ensuring that Dynatrace and SAP have an open relationship and they are able to share information regularly with each other. This is for the good of each other as partners as well as for their joint customers.

Dynatrace provides solutions around monitoring and they help bring their customer’s apps to SAP’s cloud platform.  Their technology is driven by artificial intelligence, and it helps clients find issues to troubleshoot during the migration process.  Dynatrace has been able to monitor over 21,000 applications in a year’s time.  

Dynatrace has been working with SAP for many years.  Originally, SAP was looking for a solution that could help them scale large environments, and they made the decision to partner with Dynatrace instead of building a solution internally.  Dynatrace’s solution was very scalable and supported all of the platforms they were looking to work with (Azure, AWS, etc.).  Now their relationship is much more strategic as partners.

We caught up with Pieter and had a live conversation from #SAPTechEd to talk about shared customers, working with SAP, and the importance of being involved in the totality of a product cycle.

Shared Customers

The Dynatrace/SAP relationship is unique because SAP is a partner as well as a customer.  Dynatrace serves SAP and their needs while at the same time they aim to help SAP’s other partners and customers innovate as well.  Pieter acknowledges that while the SAP platform is the ideal platform to innovate on, it does come with questions.  Dynatrace can help answer these detailed questions.

Dynatrace and SAP customers are often new to the cloud environment, so Pieter and his team help them get acclimated and comfortable.  SAP platforms are quite agile and stable, but such an elastic and dynamic environment can generate questions for customers to ask.  

Dynatrace can come in and can give project visibility to those customers with questions. They only have to install one agent to do everything needed, so it becomes simple for the customer.  This used to have to be configured on multiple levels, but now Dynatrace offers a one-time deployment.  This allows customers to quickly have the ability to innovate.

Working With SAP

SAP and Dynatrace have been working very closely together specifically on what the roadmap to joint success looks like. They want to allow future customers to take even more value out of the SAP/Dynatrace relationship.  

One of the key ways Dynatrace keeps their finger on the pulse of the relationship with SAP is regularly exchanging information and meeting physically together almost every quarter of the year.  SAP is a large and special customer and partner to Dynatrace so Pieter’s team has learned the importance of listening to what they have to say.  

Pieter says that part of the reason it has been so great to work with SAP is that they truly have put effort into establishing a great relationship.  They are shipping new releases every week or two, so this would not be possible without a close relationship.  

On that level, they’ve found their identities as partners and are in a compatible rhythm.  Pieter has found that the key to staying calm and focused is not trying to be everywhere at once.  His team realizes they can’t accomplish everything at the same time, so they focus on prioritizing important goals.  

Product Cycles

When SAP and Dynatrace work together from the very beginning of a new product through the end of its life cycle, it creates certain confidence that helps them serve their customers better.  It’ adds a massive amount of value to customers when Dynatrace and SAP work together because the two partners thrive on co-innovation.  

It creates a win/win/win scenario for SAP, Dynatrace, and customers.  SAP can make commitments to their customers because they know Dynatrace will deliver and fulfill their promises.

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