Insiders Connection CEO Series showcases senior executives and influential thinkers in the SAP ecosystem.

Hosted by SAPinsider’s Chairman & Global CEO, Jamie Bedard, each episode reflects on the current market, tomorrow’s innovations and the guest’s perspective on some of the biggest challenges facing SAPinsider members and SAP end users.

Expect expert insight and opinion plus career advice and ideas that are as applicable to an SAP newbie as a 20-year veteran.

Jamie Bedard

Your host – Jamie Bedard

Jamie is the Chairman and Global CEO of Wellesley Information Services and its family of brands, SAPinsider, Mastering SAP and ERP Today.

Jamie has over 30 years of market leading expertise in founding, leading turnarounds and ramping growth for numerous companies in the domestic and international marketplace. He is a serial entrepreneur, business builder of content driven, technology enabled businesses.

 

 

“It’s Not a Partnership, It’s a Marriage”
Inside 30 Years of SAP and Microsoft with Wael El Kabbany.

Episode Guest: Wael El Kabbany, Global Strategic Vice President for SAP, Microsoft

Anyone who has lived through an SAP upgrade knows the pattern: two years of data cleansing, code remediation and cutover rehearsals, and only then does someone ask what the business gets out of it. On this episode of the Insiders Connection CEO Series, host Jamie Bedard sits down with Wael El Kabbany, Microsoft’s Global Strategic Vice President for the SAP partnership, who says that order is backwards. The AI, agentic and security conversations should happen before or alongside your RISE with SAP on Azure decision, because they shape the target landscape. He walks through Microsoft’s own five-stage S/4HANA program and clears up the “migrated over a weekend” story: the weekend was only the cutover.

Wael also gives an update on the zero-copy integration between SAP Business Data Cloud and Microsoft Fabric, with preview and availability dates expected in the coming months. His warning is blunt: get the data layer wrong and every AI plan built on it suffers. He tells CIOs to treat AI agents like employees, with the same permissions, controls and accountability. He also covers the Joule–Copilot integration, Nestlé’s award-winning project and his career advice, and explains why today’s pace of change is the slowest it will ever be.

Watch to hear all the details

 

 

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