As Christian Klein and SAP host 30,000 of their best friends at Sapphire in Orlando this week, I expect the fast-growing enterprise-applications vendor to showcase five key capabilities that customers need to thrive in the fast-changing world of AI-powered digital business.
1. Business AI. While the automation of business processes was once orchestrated by clunky, inflexible, and sometimes indecipherable commands and interfaces, SAP’s Business AI and Joule copilot promise to usher in a wildly different experience driven by the human voice and natural language. This extraordinary cutover isn’t ready quite yet, but huge steps have been made, and Klein views that shift as an enormous opportunity for SAP to usher in a new era of optimized business operations designed to deliver optimal business outcomes with the traditional complexity of IT hidden behind elegant and totally intuitive engagements.
Plus, with the rise of AI and particularly GenAI, enterprise apps make the big jump from primarily automating processes to helping humans anticipate future needs and opportunities and plotting out the best courses to deal with them.
2. On-prem migrations and Thomas Saueressig’s new organization. SAP has been relentless in giving its 20,000+ on-prem customers lots and lots of compelling reasons to move to the cloud: the promise of better business outcomes, better insights, shorter time to value, less technical debt, financial incentives, and more. And while some of those on-prem traditionalists have made the leap into the cloud, many more have not, and for various reasons: fear of change, regulatory restrictions, an ill-conceived belief in the insidious bromide of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and less-than-compelling pitches from SAP to step into a very different world.
At this year’s Sapphire, I think we’ll see a relentless barrage of messages aimed at persuading the on-prem holdouts that migrating to the cloud is not just a different approach but a vastly superior one; that the on-prem world’s inability to harness the power of GenAI is not just unfortunate but existentially dangerous; that the cloud is no longer a fad that will fade but the indispensable technology of the future; and that the ability for on-prem customers to compete in a cloud-based and AI-powered world will diminish rapidly.
And many of those factors will be showcased by SAP Executive Board member Thomas Saueressig and his new customer services & delivery team. Until late last year, Saueressig led the massive product engineering team at SAP, but helped create the new team to help all SAP customers derive the maximum value from their investments. Two months ago, in an analysis headlined “Inside SAP: How New Customer-Service Team Led by Thomas Saueressig Will Cut ‘Disappointment’“, I offered this perspective:
The Customer Services & Delivery team serves as a post-sale bookend to SAP’s hugely successful RISE with SAP program for large-enterprise SAP customers and also the GROW with SAP program aimed at smaller companies using SAP for the first time. Plus, the acquisitions a few years ago of Signavio and more recently of LeanIX have both given customers new and high-value insights into how to map out the most-effective business and technology transformations.
3. The rollout of the ERP Cloud Suite. When SAP released its Q1 financial results in April, the company broke out publicly for the first time financial numbers for the ERP Cloud Suite, which includes modular cloud apps for financials, HR, procurement, supply chain, and more. For Q1, revenue for that newly designated ERP Cloud Suite was up a whopping 32%, and I had a lively conversation with SAP Executive Board member and chief revenue officer Scott Russell about why this newly bundled set of applications is unleashing new value for customers around data and insights. You can see that video interview here, and I offer some analysis of our discussion in “SAP’s New Cloud ERP Suite Will Turbocharge GenAI.”
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4. Connecting industries with data and Business Network. While SAP has been a major player in the rise of industry clouds over the past few years, I believe it’s on the verge of very big things with its evolving strategy around helping businesses connect with extended value chains via SAP’s Business Network. With the global phenomenon of digital business accelerating rapidly, SAP’s many decades of vertical-industry experience plus its unique and highly differentiated Business Network can provide business leaders with unmatched capabilities, insights, and — best of all —opportunities.
5. Business Technology Platform and Datasphere come of age. While enterprise applications are wonderful and SAP is the global leader, in today’s data-driven and AI-powered world those applications are more important than ever — but they’re not enough. The data they generate is the new currency in the global economy, and over the past couple of years SAP has created two separate but interdependent mega-products to help customers turn all their data into big-time business value and innovation: the Business Technology Platform, and Datasphere, which promises to help customers “unleash the power of business data.” In the world of AI, these two technologies play indispensable roles for customers and at Sapphire I expect SAP to hammer home how they help customers generate fast-paced innovation and insights.
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