Underscoring that the old hermetically sealed days of “don’t touch my code!” are long gone, SAP has further revealed its totally modern mindset by launching a set of low-code solutions aimed at business users and designed to help them accelerate decision-making and customer-oriented innovation.
It’s important to highlight the contrast between the old SAP and the new SAP because as the company was becoming the world’s largest enterprise-applications company through the first 45 years of its 50-year history, its policy toward co-creation was pretty much “I’ll create it, and you’ll buy it.”
So in that historical context, today’s announcement of the SAP Build low-code solution is rather stunning in that SAP itself says Build “puts our world-class enterprise technology in the hands of business users.”
The release of SAP Build — a solution the company says will “unleash” great new capabilities, value, and innovation for customers — is the latest example of its transformation into a cloud-first company after about 45 years of being focused on its massive installed base of on-premises customers.
Noting that Build has been designed to “rapidly unleash business users’ expertise,” CTO Juergen Mueller said it and a slew of other new products and services are aimed at helping customers deal with “a volatile business landscape,” “future-proof their business,” and “extract maximum value from their technology investments.”
As I see it, these introductions underscore the sweeping makeover at SAP that’s taken place in the past few years as its Business Technology Platform has gone from an elusive goal to becoming a huge difference-maker for SAP. The platform has:
- enabled the unification of SAP’s vast portfolio of cloud applications under a single data model and made life much, much simpler for customers while also making SAP more competitive in the apps market;
- demonstrated SAP’s rapidly growing ability to address almost all slices of the fast-changing and fast-growing cloud solutions business;
- given customers and partners the ability to co-create an enormous range of solutions and services complementary to what SAP itself can build; and
- has now become a full-fledged partner in giving those customers advanced capabilities via low-code to begin building their own solutions and other innovations essential to the digital economy.
As always, some folks outside of SAP will say it’s too little, too late. But I think that’s nonsense because SAP knows its existing code and its existing customers and their industries far better than any third party could possibly match. And as Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has pointed out on several occasions, what customers want from the cloud today and into the future is very different than the cloud desires they had three or five years ago.
SAP can’t change what it’s done or hasn’t done in the past, but in the past 32 months under CEO Christian Klein, it has been aggressively and rapidly changing who it is and what it can do in the future.
This launch of SAP Build and its laser-sharp focus on business users and the speed and insights that are so vital to their roles are perfect examples of how SAP is fleshing out the vision laid out by Klein and his leadership team, with particular kudos to CTO Mueller. Again, the second-guessers can say that SAP’s new batch of low-code solutions is merely the company’s attempt to play catch-up — and again, I think that’s nonsense.
Because what SAP has that those low-code specialists most certainly do NOT have are hundreds of thousands of customers across the globe, and many tens of thousands of customers in the cloud across every industry. Those customers will no doubt pick and choose across the growing ranks of low-code providers, and even those that don’t choose SAP will want to see what it has to offer because, after all, all of these solutions from all of those providers are aimed at SAP customers — and who knows them and their needs better than SAP does?
In closing, here are a few details from SAP about the various types of value Build can offer to business users:
- it’s designed to work with third-party software as well as software from SAP;
- instead of having to bring in professional developers, business users can use Build to monitor, analyze, and automate processes;
- and those non-tech business users can even “build applications for the last mile of innovation” without having to move data into an external system.
In addition, since SAP’s Signavio business-process intelligence service is natively integrated within Build, business users can scan all of their processes and create a set of priorities to identify and address the most pressing needs.
The launch of SAP Build and the range of capabilities SAP is now offering to business users strikes me as another powerful reason why Christian Klein recently said that SAP’s current quarter, ending in just over six weeks on Dec. 31, will be its “largest Q4 on record.”
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