In the spotlight: Accelerating growth at Basis Technologies
Martin Metcalf has been the CEO at Basis Technologies since 2013. He’s built the business into a global software company that helps large, complex enterprises change SAP at the speed of their business, so they are better able to adapt and evolve to market conditions.
SAP is used to run nearly 90% of the world’s largest businesses. Through Basis’s intelligent change management software, companies like Kimberly Clark, 3M, and Vistaprint make faster, smarter changes to their SAP estates - turning SAP change from a bottleneck to a competitive advantage.
In this article, Martin shares the major milestones Basis has achieved since SEP invested in the company in 2021, from creating and driving a new market category, to developing a powerful new generation of products.
How has Basis developed in the four years since SEP invested $25 million?
SEP’s investment gave us the ability to take the next step forward in almost every area of our business. From professional advice and support, through introductions to SAP, to the ability to hire the talent we needed to drive faster, more sustainable growth, SEP has been there for us.
For example, we’ve been introduced to highly regarded independent SAP market analysts and advisors like Josh Greenbaum, and John Reed at Diginomica who have helped us shape our future strategy.
Much of this has informed our new market-led growth strategy focused on intelligent change management for large enterprises that run on SAP. We’ve moved away from a product-led strategy to a focus on making and shaping a new category to drive faster, more sustainable growth.
During this period, we have invested in the next generation of AI-enabled, intelligent change products. Historically, change management has been all about executing change well. Now with AI, it’s centred on identifying, planning and executing the right change. This capability offers significantly greater value to our customers and presents a compelling opportunity for Basis to deliver impact.
We have also significantly improved our ESG (environmental, social and governance) considerations generally, but especially on diversity and equality. We have worked hard to build an inclusive culture, so we were very pleased to be awarded the ‘Best Workplace for Women’ certification in 2023 and 2024, as well as the ‘Great Place to Work’ certification for consecutive years since 2022.
Why do organisations need Basis Technologies software to help manage their SAP systems?
SAP is the global standard for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Its reach is huge: its customers account for 87% of global commerce. In short, the world relies on businesses that run on SAP systems - from food manufacturers to pharmaceutical companies and financial institutions.
ERP systems underpin all the core business processes involved in running a company; from finance and HR, through manufacturing, supply chain, services, procurement and others. SAP’s software manages all these processes in one integrated system. In other words, it’s the heartbeat of the business.
What we’re seeing is a colossal shift. These enterprises are facing a world where they need to continuously adapt and evolve, but too often SAP change is labelled as the bottleneck holding them back. At Basis Technologies, we’re enabling them to drive SAP at the speed of business, so they are never left behind.
Our products expedite change management processes that are mission-critical to our customers. To give an example; one of our customers B&Q (part of the Kingfisher group), relies on our ActiveControl software to be able to open new warehouses at speed.
What is driving demand in your marketplace?
Organisations are realising the old way of managing SAP change can’t keep up with the pace of business today. Gradual evolution and long change cycles used to be the norm, but that is no longer practical. To compete, enterprises must adapt and evolve - or face getting left behind their peers.
For our customers, that means the role of SAP change teams has shifted from managing long and slow SAP transformation projects, to now facing increased pressure from the business to expedite change in days and weeks - not months and years.
In addition to this, SAP is also changing the market by driving its customers toward its Cloud and Clean Core strategy, which emphasises minimal customisations and using cloud extensions for modifications. For many of our customers, this journey is difficult and doesn’t happen overnight.
Basis Technologies has a huge opportunity to help customers identify the best way to navigate the upgrades they need to make in their estate, and how to better manage change.
What makes Basis different from your competitors?
Our competitors have chosen to compete at the product/benefit level. We have made a strategic decision to reposition from being an operational “nice-to-have" change management tool to a strategic must-have.
We have brought that to life through Intelligent Change Management. It’s a new way of thinking about change - shifting SAP from the change bottleneck to the heartbeat of business competitiveness. Our Intelligent Change solutions help teams manage change through the whole process, from identifying the right changes to make, all the way to executing them intelligently. This allows IT teams to respond to the business needs at the speed the enterprise needs.
Take our new product, Klario. It’s a first-of-its-kind platform built to help IT teams manage change intelligently by identifying the best SAP change delivery approach based on a business request. It uses AI to surface insights based on real-world implementations of the SAP community. Instead of teams spending weeks building change plans, Klario creates them in minutes.
Businesses need to pick up the pace of change and we help them do that. It means our customers don’t have to start from a blank page and can go ahead and execute change confidently and at speed.
What benefits does Basis deliver for customers?
We exist to help our customers run SAP change at the speed of business. The goal is to help enterprises continuously adapt and evolve by driving faster, smarter change.
Klario does this by creating SAP blueprints in minutes, not months. Our ActiveDiscover product helps SAP teams predict and prevent change failures before they happen, and when combined with ActiveControl enables enterprises to confidently run complex change at speed and stay ahead of the competition. As an example, one customer, Carhartt, was able to quickly change prices ahead of a Black Friday sale so they weren’t outpaced by a competitor.
Many of the world’s largest organisations using SAP trust Basis Technologies products to drive continuous change in this way. These include Honda, Sony Music, P&G, Boeing, Schwarz, Ericsson and many more.
We have been able to reduce the change implementation timeframes from three months to three hours for some customers, while others that previously could only make system changes once a year can now make them daily.
What is happening with product development?
We are very excited about growth opportunities for our new product, Klario, which was announced on stage by SAP at their 2025 flagship event in Orlando. It is the latest addition to SAP’s Integrated Toolchain which is designed to support all phases of change management, from planning to execution.
Bringing that to market is a major milestone. Alongside Klario, we continue to focus on our suite of intelligent change management solutions - including ActiveControl and ActiveDiscover - which help our customers understand and predict the impact of planned changes so they can be executed at the pace the business requires. The goal is to bring these solutions together into a suite of capabilities that cover the entire SAP change management process.
What are you focusing on for the next phase of your growth journey?
Our goal is to continue to transform Basis from a product-led business into a market-led business. We believe that this is the key to driving faster, more sustainable growth. The great news is that the market has gone through a shift, from the new business imperative driving our customers to be more adaptable and agile, to the growth catalyst created by SAP driving its Cloud and Clean Core agenda. Large enterprises need us to help them manage change and we’re focused on stepping up to fulfil that need.
This means doing more to educate our customers on intelligent change management, building our go-to-market engine to drive growth, and continuing to develop our product strategy to give our customers new, intelligent change capabilities that turn SAP change from a bottleneck to a core competitive advantage. There’s never been a more exciting time for Basis as we embark on our next phase of growth with SEP’s support.
"We exist to help our customers run SAP change at the speed of business. The goal is to help enterprises continuously adapt and evolve by driving faster, smarter change."
In the spotlight: Accelerating growth at Basis Technologies
Martin Metcalf has been the CEO at Basis Technologies since 2013. He’s built the business into a global software company that helps large, complex enterprises change SAP at the speed of their business, so they are better able to adapt and evolve to market conditions.
SAP is used to run nearly 90% of the world’s largest businesses. Through Basis’s intelligent change management software, companies like Kimberly Clark, 3M, and Vistaprint make faster, smarter changes to their SAP estates - turning SAP change from a bottleneck to a competitive advantage.
In this article, Martin shares the major milestones Basis has achieved since SEP invested in the company in 2021, from creating and driving a new market category, to developing a powerful new generation of products.
How has Basis developed in the four years since SEP invested $25 million?
SEP’s investment gave us the ability to take the next step forward in almost every area of our business. From professional advice and support, through introductions to SAP, to the ability to hire the talent we needed to drive faster, more sustainable growth, SEP has been there for us.
For example, we’ve been introduced to highly regarded independent SAP market analysts and advisors like Josh Greenbaum, and John Reed at Diginomica who have helped us shape our future strategy.
Much of this has informed our new market-led growth strategy focused on intelligent change management for large enterprises that run on SAP. We’ve moved away from a product-led strategy to a focus on making and shaping a new category to drive faster, more sustainable growth.
During this period, we have invested in the next generation of AI-enabled, intelligent change products. Historically, change management has been all about executing change well. Now with AI, it’s centred on identifying, planning and executing the right change. This capability offers significantly greater value to our customers and presents a compelling opportunity for Basis to deliver impact.
We have also significantly improved our ESG (environmental, social and governance) considerations generally, but especially on diversity and equality. We have worked hard to build an inclusive culture, so we were very pleased to be awarded the ‘Best Workplace for Women’ certification in 2023 and 2024, as well as the ‘Great Place to Work’ certification for consecutive years since 2022.
Why do organisations need Basis Technologies software to help manage their SAP systems?
SAP is the global standard for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Its reach is huge: its customers account for 87% of global commerce. In short, the world relies on businesses that run on SAP systems - from food manufacturers to pharmaceutical companies and financial institutions.
ERP systems underpin all the core business processes involved in running a company; from finance and HR, through manufacturing, supply chain, services, procurement and others. SAP’s software manages all these processes in one integrated system. In other words, it’s the heartbeat of the business.
What we’re seeing is a colossal shift. These enterprises are facing a world where they need to continuously adapt and evolve, but too often SAP change is labelled as the bottleneck holding them back. At Basis Technologies, we’re enabling them to drive SAP at the speed of business, so they are never left behind.
Our products expedite change management processes that are mission-critical to our customers. To give an example; one of our customers B&Q (part of the Kingfisher group), relies on our ActiveControl software to be able to open new warehouses at speed.
What is driving demand in your marketplace?
Organisations are realising the old way of managing SAP change can’t keep up with the pace of business today. Gradual evolution and long change cycles used to be the norm, but that is no longer practical. To compete, enterprises must adapt and evolve - or face getting left behind their peers.
For our customers, that means the role of SAP change teams has shifted from managing long and slow SAP transformation projects, to now facing increased pressure from the business to expedite change in days and weeks - not months and years.
In addition to this, SAP is also changing the market by driving its customers toward its Cloud and Clean Core strategy, which emphasises minimal customisations and using cloud extensions for modifications. For many of our customers, this journey is difficult and doesn’t happen overnight.
Basis Technologies has a huge opportunity to help customers identify the best way to navigate the upgrades they need to make in their estate, and how to better manage change.
What makes Basis different from your competitors?
Our competitors have chosen to compete at the product/benefit level. We have made a strategic decision to reposition from being an operational “nice-to-have" change management tool to a strategic must-have.
We have brought that to life through Intelligent Change Management. It’s a new way of thinking about change - shifting SAP from the change bottleneck to the heartbeat of business competitiveness. Our Intelligent Change solutions help teams manage change through the whole process, from identifying the right changes to make, all the way to executing them intelligently. This allows IT teams to respond to the business needs at the speed the enterprise needs.
Take our new product, Klario. It’s a first-of-its-kind platform built to help IT teams manage change intelligently by identifying the best SAP change delivery approach based on a business request. It uses AI to surface insights based on real-world implementations of the SAP community. Instead of teams spending weeks building change plans, Klario creates them in minutes.
Businesses need to pick up the pace of change and we help them do that. It means our customers don’t have to start from a blank page and can go ahead and execute change confidently and at speed.
What benefits does Basis deliver for customers?
We exist to help our customers run SAP change at the speed of business. The goal is to help enterprises continuously adapt and evolve by driving faster, smarter change.
Klario does this by creating SAP blueprints in minutes, not months. Our ActiveDiscover product helps SAP teams predict and prevent change failures before they happen, and when combined with ActiveControl enables enterprises to confidently run complex change at speed and stay ahead of the competition. As an example, one customer, Carhartt, was able to quickly change prices ahead of a Black Friday sale so they weren’t outpaced by a competitor.
Many of the world’s largest organisations using SAP trust Basis Technologies products to drive continuous change in this way. These include Honda, Sony Music, P&G, Boeing, Schwarz, Ericsson and many more.
We have been able to reduce the change implementation timeframes from three months to three hours for some customers, while others that previously could only make system changes once a year can now make them daily.
What is happening with product development?
We are very excited about growth opportunities for our new product, Klario, which was announced on stage by SAP at their 2025 flagship event in Orlando. It is the latest addition to SAP’s Integrated Toolchain which is designed to support all phases of change management, from planning to execution.
Bringing that to market is a major milestone. Alongside Klario, we continue to focus on our suite of intelligent change management solutions - including ActiveControl and ActiveDiscover - which help our customers understand and predict the impact of planned changes so they can be executed at the pace the business requires. The goal is to bring these solutions together into a suite of capabilities that cover the entire SAP change management process.
What are you focusing on for the next phase of your growth journey?
Our goal is to continue to transform Basis from a product-led business into a market-led business. We believe that this is the key to driving faster, more sustainable growth. The great news is that the market has gone through a shift, from the new business imperative driving our customers to be more adaptable and agile, to the growth catalyst created by SAP driving its Cloud and Clean Core agenda. Large enterprises need us to help them manage change and we’re focused on stepping up to fulfil that need.
This means doing more to educate our customers on intelligent change management, building our go-to-market engine to drive growth, and continuing to develop our product strategy to give our customers new, intelligent change capabilities that turn SAP change from a bottleneck to a core competitive advantage. There’s never been a more exciting time for Basis as we embark on our next phase of growth with SEP’s support.
