Jens Amail: The SNP CEO on Winning Together

Sitting down with Jens Amail, SNP Group’s CEO, at the company’s Transformation World conference in Heidelberg, Germany, you get a sense of the driving forces of his enthusiasm as the man at the helm. With Amail there is a strive to evolve with users’ needs – rather fittingly in a year defined by Olympics sports – doing the best that is possible, a lesson borrowed from the giants of sport.

Stepping into the CEO’s shoes

“SNP was the perfect opportunity for me. It was like it was meant to be”

While spending a good deal of his professional experience at a senior executive level at SAP, Amail admits to always having the clear conviction that he never wanted to retire from a big company. “I always wanted to take on a role with a holistic entrepreneurial responsibility to really make an impact, and I made this clear to my employer early on.”

Amail recalls that despite SAP’s understanding of his intentions, his expertise was in high demand at the company. “They said, ‘Oh, wait a minute, we understand. But now we have a problem in the UK. Can you help us here?’ And I was always there whenever we had any issues.” While having the intention to stay in the UK for only two years, the stint stretched longer, but when the pandemic hit, he thought to himself: “Okay, finally, now with COVID kicking in, I’m going back to Germany and I’m going to work for a smaller company.”

But again, destiny had other plans:  “My management asked me if I would temporarily take over the business in China, as I was very familiar with the region due to a previous assignment living with my family in Shanghai between 2013 and 2015 ,” he recalls, which saw him extend this ‘tour of duty’ for another two years.

Then at the end of 2022, finally, it was clear that the right time had come. When the SNP leadership opportunity came knocking on the door, Amail was ready for it. “A business partner – and old sports friend – said ‘It’s the perfect opportunity. It’s like it was meant to be’”.

“I believe in the product, the tech, the core talent”

What really appealed to Amail about SNP was the opportunity of a global company with the potential to have a direct impact. “It was an SAP environment. So, I could apply everything I had learned at SAP. I could leverage my ecosystem and my network within the company.”

One could say Amail happened to be in the right place at the right time, but he already had a view of SNP’s work. “I believed in the product, the tech, the core talent […] And I’m also more convinced than I was two years ago that the talent in all core functions is absolutely sensational.”

Leaning on legacy and sportsmanship

Commonly known in the market as originator of the BLUEFIELD™ approach where it migrates selective historical data relevant to the business – regardless of whether the entire system will be redesigned or not – SNP has built a name for itself with over 15,000 projects successfully completed with its methodology.

As part of the core principles upon taking SNP’s helm, Amail didn’t identify a great deal that needed changing: “We just needed to apply a few catalysts to unleash the power, so to say, of SNP.”

For example, regarding the topic of partner ecosystems, “in 2022, the SNP ecosystem was growing just a little bit less even than the direct business. Now we have an overall push with the ecosystem. And partner business is growing. In the first six months of 2024, we have seen more than half of our business coming through our partner ecosystem,” he says.

But what makes SNP the success it is? Amail believes that category design has a lot to do with this, thanking late founder Dr. Andreas Schneider-Neureither. “People are going to Starbucks because Starbucks invented that category, right? And there’s so much literature and science about category design and the benefits of a category builder, which in a textbook way, applies to us.”

The message relayed here is that SNP invented the category of selective SAP data migrations, which has positioned it as a “Category King,” defined by “willfully developing a category and setting itself up as the company that dominates it,” allowing the company to earn a market share of about 76-77 percent coverage.

Having Schneider-Neureither’s legacy to lean on, Amail says that it’s something the whole team is honoring: “His vision, his courage, his boldness, made us the Category King here and now we have massive tailwinds migrating customers to SAP S/4HANA and RISE with SAP. In the past, you had a carve out every five years. You had M&A every five years. Now the frequency of our traditional core business is also dramatically ramping up.”

Sport is also part of this legacy, with this year’s Transformation World conference being held in the SNP Dome, a sphere-like multi-purpose hall in the Kirchheim district of Heidelberg, allowing SNP to enjoy representation in the community while hosting local sports, events and competitions.

As the German national basketball team is reaching new heights and young kids are regularly watching the NBA, the building that SNP sponsored three years ago, with a decade-long contract, provides a good impression for the company. “It reflects giving back to the community, being integrated in it as they play school sports here. So I think that’s very nice and it’s a very visible branding for us as an employer and a partner of SAP.”

The sports analogies and inspiration don’t stop there, with Amail being a big tennis fan, evidenced by multiple sportsmanship analogies during the conference in June and the UEFA European Football Championship hype present in the streets of Heidelberg at the outset of the tournament.

Asked if there are any lessons that he takes from sports in his day-to-day work, the CEO tells us about drawing inspiration for business from tennis, and one of the most accomplished players, the recently retired Rafael Nadal, especially with respect to competition. “Nadal says, ‘I don’t care if I win or lose, the only thing I care about is that I give the best possible version of myself. I do everything I can and if it’s not enough, if the opponent is better, the only thing I can do is do the best I can every single time.’”

However, just like any evolving environment, SNP is facing unique challenges, including “finding the right balance between jumping on everything, growing 50 percent every quarter, seizing the big market opportunities while at the same time making sure we hire the right talent, deliver on the projects we have sold and focus on customer success,” the CEO shares.

SNP: Leading the integration evolution

“We’re moving  towards composable enterprise, with a multi-vendor, multi-cloud,  API-based app landscape”

Driving both the natural and market-driven evolution of the business was the realization that as the market is becoming more relevant and more complicated, the addressable market is further expanding. Just as global events like climate change, regional conflicts, relevance of AI and a growing world population are driving the need for businesses to do transformations more often, “everything we do is becoming more relevant because of the macroeconomic dynamics.”

For this reason, as part of a wider readjustment of the company’s focus, SNP recently announced that it is diversifying from solely SAP migrations and branching out to migrate across other ERPs. The company explains the swift change of direction as a pure effect of evolution and that companies will not store all data in SAP tables forever. “So we move towards a composable enterprise, where we have a multi-vendor, multi-cloud, API-based application landscape, and we need to get ready for that and accommodate it.”

However, on this journey of enabling transformations from a data side and improving transformation capabilities to enable business agility, Amail notes an important distinction – that SNP has no intentions of becoming a system integrator, nor an applications or analytics company, with its core mission remaining unchanged. As a step in this new direction, SNP has enhanced its data migration and management platform to work with more sources and targets, expanding the CrystalBridge solution via the newly introduced SNP Kyano platform. Kyano leverages the software assets from SNP’s acquisition of SAP data specialists Datavard in 2021, in addition to AI for data model discovery of third-party applications, focusing on bringing non-SAP source data into SAP.

In this way, Kyano works to migrate and integrate any data to SAP and any data to any platform. Users are also promised to benefit from automated processes and guided procedures to de-risk and speed up data migrations from any source to any target.

As opposed to the past when there would be a long decision process for an M&A activity and integration or migration would take place once in five years, for example, this has changed significantly. “Nowadays, all companies have to be much more agile with data at all times. They basically need an industrialized factory approach to enable fast and efficient transformations carried out in parallel,” Amail says. It allows companies to be agile while SNP takes care of the data migration.

With this clear direction and ever-growing enthusiasm for transformations, SNP is also putting an emphasis on bringing its teams together. Just like in sports, where good culture and sportsmanship become a key determining factor, the CEO is working towards welcoming different perspectives. “What we are trying to do is to have a room full of people where everybody has a voice and a seat at the table. That’s what we are trying to do on all levels.” Working on building a culture where “SNP is only successful when everybody is successful”, Amail highlights that the individual experience is just as important and if everybody is successful, then the company is successful. “So, it needs to go both ways. I have a sincere belief that everybody matters to us equally,” he concludes.