With the confluence of cloud, big data, social networking and mobile, the IT industry is at a major inflection point that requires solution providers to adapt in order to survive, said SAP channel chief Kevin Gilroy, speaking Tuesday at the Best of Breed Conference in Orlando, Fla.

"The history of business and the history of the channel tells us that 40 percent of the channel partners will have negative growth and many will die out," said Gilroy, senior vice president, global indirect channels at SAP, Walldorf, Germany. "If you take a look the BoB Conference or an XChange Conference … 40 percent of those partners will absolutely miss this curve. They might not go out of business, they’ll sell, they’ll become much smaller companies, they'll get downsized, and you probably know many of them."

An additional 40 percent of partners will make minor changes and "hang on," while only 20 percent will catch the inflection point, he said.

"SAP is not ignoring the cloud but embracing it," he said, noting that the current inflection point, which brings together big data, cloud computing, social networking, mobile and the changing consumption paradigms driven by millennials, potentially has the most opportunity -- and the most danger -- of the past 25 years.

"[These technologies] are colliding together to create a point in time that if you are the owner, the manager, or part of the leadership team of a partner or a supplier, it requires introspection," Gilroy said, saying that constant introspection is the No. 1 trait he sees in "A players"

It's advice he's taking to heart himself as SAP is overhauling its channel strategy to succeed in the new era, he said.

"We're going to reinvent the whole thing. We have to reinvent the whole thing. It's not an adjustment, it's a complete reengineering," Gilroy said. SAP has been working to recast itself as a cloud company, including it's recent move to buy Concur Technologies, maker of business expense and travel management tools, for $8.3 billion in a deal expected to close this quarter.

SAP's cloud-enabled portfolio and fresh channel strategy is attracting interest from partners looking for nimble vendors to team with.

"If you look at SAP 10 years ago, we're talking large-scale implementations and heavy business process and business engagement that truthfully a lot of customers these days can't afford … To see these applications move into smaller implementations is exciting," said Michael Leeper, CTO of Denali Advanced Integration, a solution provider in Redmond, Wash. "We're seeing SAP's product family morph and transform into much more accessible product sets, and by cloud-enabling them it allows the on-boarding process and the speed of value to the customers happen so much faster."