ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the evolution of SAP Services and highlights how the company manages to actively drive change on a global scale. It describes how SAP Services, the services arm of SAP, senses and reacts to changing customer needs and reinvents the market for software-related services. SAP Services is constantly transforming its business model to meet the ever changing customer demands in the IT services industry. The chapter presents an overview and preliminary findings on the transformation of SAP Services. It aims to gain a better understanding of SAPs motivation for offering software-related services. In the software business, the margin of services is much lower than the margin of software products, given that the marginal costs are nearly zero to copy a piece of software. The goal of SAP Services, perceived as being a big but not necessarily unique player in the market, is to become an indispensable partner for two constituencies: SAPs customers and the overall SAP group.
