Marketing leaders often inherit brands at very different stages of maturity. When you joined Avantra, what was the first thing you wanted to understand before deciding what needed to change, and what deserved to stay exactly as it was?
When joining Avantra, my focus was not geared towards, “What do I want to change,” but rather towards gaining a deep understanding of Avantra’s origins, how it evolved, and the future Avantra envisioned, ensuring preservation of Avantra’s rich 25+ year history and close partnership with SAP at the core of our brand and GTM strategy.
Avantra’s original ambition was practical and important: reduce the operational overhead of SAP and improve visibility across complex SAP landscapes. Avantra’s market position today as the deterministic execution layer for SAP is the next logical chapter in our history—to eliminate repetitive SAP operations, reduce cost-to-serve, and move customers toward the self-healing enterprise, unifying end-to-end hybrid operations and giving customers the intelligence, automation, and security needed to migrate and transform with confidence.
Change for change’s sake in branding can and does devastate company growth and erodes trust, which cannot happen when dealing with the heart of the world’s largest, complex global enterprises—their ERP operations. Statistics prove time and time again constant rebranding reduces customer confidence and negatively impacts brand awareness across markets big and small. The stakes are even higher when customers are choosing technology for business-critical operations, so wholesale GTM brand strategy changes must be considered extremely carefully to protect brand equity in our space.
Our brand equity, our name, its regionally recognizable identity, and its deep SAP credibility, and our company’s evolution all fueled the strong central idea in “Now you’re really running.” Marketing’s role now is to bring transparency to what we do in the market, provide credible evidence, and maintain consistency between what we promise and what customers experience.
A decade from now, I want “Now you’re really running” to feel less like a tagline and more like the operational standard Avantra helped establish.
SAP operations don't usually make headlines until something breaks. How do you market a platform built around preventing problems customers hope they'll never have?
Prevention is an unusual value proposition because the best outcome often looks like nothing happened. SAP kept running; payroll went out; orders moved; customers were served. Few people evangelize or write congratulatory emails about near misses or incidents avoided.
The beauty of the value Avantra brings is much broader than to simply focus on marketing about business disruption or possible disaster. We make the cost of operational uncertainty visible, then show what confidence enables. Avantra helps customers reduce downtime and risk, but it also gives skilled teams time back, and most importantly, protects transformation programs and creates greater confidence to modernize. The conversation moves from “monitoring” to business continuity, productivity, and operational assurance.
Proof matters enormously. We use real customer outcomes, before-and-after stories, and specific examples of liberating high-value resources to focus on transformation. Fear may attract attention, but evidence creates the buying case.
Ultimately, we are not selling the absence of a problem. We are selling the ability to run a business-critical SAP estate predictably and move forward without every change feeling like it may have introduced business risk.
If you stripped away every buzzword around AIOps and observability, what's the real problem Avantra is solving for enterprise teams?
I guess put simply, hybrid enterprise SAP environments have become more complex than the global teams running them can reasonably manage by hand.
Most complex global organizations are operating a mixture of legacy and modern systems across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Expertise can be scarce. Institutional knowledge is a problem, and too much time goes into interpreting alerts, repeating routine tasks, and switching between disconnected tools. Meanwhile, the business still expects SAP to be available, secure, and compliant every minute of the day.
Avantra gives teams one operational view, identifies risk earlier, automates repeatable work, and helps engineers reach the cause of a problem faster. It turns expert knowledge into something the wider team can use, converting complexity into clear action proactively to protect the business and free people to focus on higher-value work.
Not every customer is trying to modernize for the same reason. Some are chasing efficiency, others resilience, others transformation. How do you build a marketing strategy that speaks to all of those priorities without becoming too broad?
The answer is not to create one generic message capable of covering every possible priority. Generic relevance is usually another name for irrelevance. We start with one consistent promise: Avantra gives organizations operational confidence across complex SAP environments and every stage of their transformation journey. We then build distinct entry points around the job each customer needs to do.
For an efficiency-led buyer, the value we bring focuses on automation, capacity, and cost. For a resilience-led buyer, it centers on availability, risk, security, and compliance. For a transformation-led buyer, the value is in maintaining control across hybrid environments and reducing the operational risk of change.
The platform is the same; the business case, proof, and language are specific. Customers choose Avantra for different reasons, but the depth and breadth of the platform allow Avantra to evolve and grow with the customers as they transform.
There's often a gap between what product teams are excited to build and what customers are actually ready to buy. Where do you see marketing's role in closing that gap?
Our GTM teams are deeply integrated powerhouses (I know I am biased) and are involved long before a launch plan or press release. Marketing’s role here is clarity: bring market truth into the product conversation and translate product possibility into customer urgency.
Product teams naturally see what technology can do. Customers buy when they understand why it matters now, trust the outcome, can justify the investment, and see a practical path to adoption. Marketing helps connect those two perspectives by bringing in customer insight, sales feedback, competitive context, and willingness to partner and expand.
Markets move quickly, but enterprise buyers rarely do. How do you keep Avantra's marketing relevant without chasing every new trend that comes along?
Trends are inputs, not strategy. We keep Avantra relevant by partnering closely with SAP and staying close to durable customer problems: operational complexity, scarce expertise, business continuity, security, cost, and the pressure to modernize without increasing risk. Those problems evolve more slowly than the vocabulary around them.
When new trends emerge, we ask whether customer behavior is genuinely changing, whether it improves a meaningful outcome, and whether we can deliver credible value. AI is a good example. We are not interested in adding an AI label to an existing feature. We are interested in reducing investigation time, making expert knowledge more accessible, and moving teams from alert to action faster.
Our goal here is to be early on delivering customer value, not merely early on terminology usage. Chasing trends creates noise. Choosing the changes which matter creates relevance.
Imagine someone who has never heard of Avantra asks you, “What do you want this company to be remembered for a decade from now?” What's your answer, and what role does marketing play in making that legacy real?
My “North Star” is for Avantra to be remembered as the company which made the world’s most complex SAP environments run so reliably and intelligently, allowing teams to stop firefighting and start transforming. Transformation is continuous and permeates all areas of the organization, so Avantra’s legacy should be more than the tech. It’s about the valuable time returned to people, the business disruption prevented, the consumer trust protected, and the confidence we gave organizations to modernize. In enterprise operations, making complexity feel “uneventful” is the achievement.
Marketing’s role is not to invent this legacy. Product, people, and customer experience create it. Marketing shines the “spotlight,” carries the customer evidence into the market, and builds message and brand consistency the market needs.
