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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I share several insights from my interview with SAP’s Chief Revenue Officer Scott Russell. The interview will be posted in its entirety later today.
Highlights
00:31 — I recently interviewed SAP Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Board member Scott Russell. Russell believes that the combination of SAP’s new Cloud ERP Suite plus Business AI is going to bring enormous business value to SAP’s customers. It’s also going to be a big incentive for SAP’s 20,000 or so on-prem customers to switch over to the cloud.
01:44 — The Cloud ERP Suite is a new bundle of SAP applications. Russell said, “… more and more SAP customers want to have similar applications and data models where they can get the full power of end-to-end processes and get the data that comes out of that so that they can dig into this data and use it to fuel what they’re doing with AI.”
02:18 — Business AI now, Russell said, has 27,000 customers. They’re using it to drive insights, productivity, and growth. Russell believes that the combination of these two things — the Cloud ERP Suite and Business AI — lets customers not only solve some of the challenges they’re facing today but build a foundation for future transformation into fully digital businesses powered by AI.
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03:27 — The power that SAP has, perhaps uniquely as the world’s largest business applications provider, is that it’s got massive amounts of data both in its SAP systems and through what they’re doing with Datasphere. All of that then can be carefully and appropriately used to feed what it’s doing with Business AI and its Joule copilot.
04:00 — SAP is leading the way in terms of offering a suite of applications; Workday has talked about the power of the suite; Oracle is doing it with its Fusion applications. There does seem to be a tendency for businesses to move toward a suite and that’s where I think the SAP’s new emphasis on calling it the Cloud ERP suite is coming from.
