Bill: Michael, how were your trips?

Michael: Fantastic. I had the pleasure of presenting at the events in São Paulo, Brazil, and Mexico City. These are key markets for SAP, and I was really blown away by the attendance, the scale, and the energy. The programs were SAPPHIRE-like events, with 6,000 to 8,000 people, a large show floor, and big theater presentations.

Bill: What were the key topics?

Michael: There was a very strong focus on SAP HANA – both for SAP Business Suite on HANA and as a platform. In Mexico City, Bill McDermott launched SAP Business Suite for SAP HANA in Latin America, and that generated a lot of excitement. SAP is the only company offering anything like this, and it’s a game-changer for enterprise software.

Bill: How did the audience respond?

Michael: Our message resonated very well. People understand that running SAP Business Suite in memory is really unique, because it takes away critical boundaries and restrictions that have made IT solutions, especially high-speed transactional and analytics applications, complex.

Bill: What did you tell them about SAP’s experience in running SAP CRM on SAP HANA?

Michael: We showed how we run our internal SAP CRM system on SAP HANA for more than 14,000 registered users, and support up to 10,000 concurrent users. These people represent all lines of business, from marketing to sales and support to finance to field services – all running on and sharing the same system, and all working with the same customer data.

As a result, SAP’s team gets a 360^o view of every customer, from the first lead throughout the entire buying process to ongoing support. With CRM on SAP HANA, all transactions are processed on the same platform as our CRM Analytics. This means that all data is available in real-time, without the need to pre-configure cubes, drill-downs, and accelerations – it is all available in memory in an instant for whatever analysis you would like to run. That’s something that a lot of companies would really love to have. And we can show them how it runs in real life. We have very good proof points on processes that were never possible before.

We also showed that with SAP HANA, infrastructure and applications are moving closer together and becoming interwoven. So from an organizational perspective, there’s less of a divide.

Bill: What kind of questions did you get?

Michael: People asked a lot of very detailed and insightful questions about SAP CRM on SAP HANA, especially related to disaster recovery, failover scenarios.

They also asked whether we’re really running SAP HANA as a database – which we are. Some people still think of the traditional “sidecar” scenario. So when we tell them that their ordinary database will go away, they’re surprised and think about the implications for the system landscape and their teams. But when we explain that all their well-established SAP mechanisms and practices – including backup and restore – will still work the same way, they become more comfortable. They need to see a live, credible reference, and SAP is one.

The most exciting discussions with customers in both Brazil and Mexico were about business scenarios in different industries, from Financial Services to Engineering and Mining. We talked about the possibilities that SAP HANA brings and how they can apply to new business scenarios in their industry.

Bill: Was this a sneak preview of your presentations at SAPPHIRE NOW 2013?

Michael: Absolutely. Attendees can expect to hear a lot more about how we’re using SAP Business Suite on SAP HANA. And judging from my trip, that’s what everyone is most excited about.

# # #

What will APJ customers be looking for @ SAPPHIRE?

A few weeks ago, at the SAP Forum in Mumbai, I had the opportunity to host a CIO lunch. During this lunch and the conversations that followed, one theme stood out – all the companies represented at the discussion were eager to exchange ideas on enterprise innovation. I was amazed at the intensity and passion of my peers to make technology work for the success of their business and grow their footprints beyond local and regional markets (many of who were well established towards that direction).

This made me reflect on our own SAP story in the Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) region. Over the last 25 years of SAP being present in APJ, we have grown exponentially in this region, with a diverse ecosystem of customers, partners and employees. The correlation between our growth and the growth in the industry in APJ is not a co-incidence. Operating in 12 countries, today we have over 14,000 employees and 1,400 partners in the APJ region supporting around 22,000 customers.

A pillar of our success has been SAP’s ability to innovate in different technology categories, and bring these innovations into the enterprise space. At Global IT, we strive to be early adopters of SAP’s innovations and we ourselves continually innovate our IT services and solutions.

As an example, by using our SAP Afaria platform, over the last 3 years we were able to deploy over 45K smartphones (IOS and Android based) and 5,5K BYOD mobile devices. Our large employee footprint in India and China has seen a significant adoption of BYOD for mobile phones, which validates that the consumerization of IT is real.

To support these mobile devices, we had to also innovate our IT services. We have established Enterprise Mobility Solution Centers in multiple key locations within the region, to provide a more consumer-centric support to our employees. As a result, employees get a personalized service each time they have an issue with any IT equipment, and our IT satisfaction has really grown.

Heading into SAPPHIRE next week, I’m eager to welcome and look forward to meeting our customers from APJ. Customers will be able to meet Global IT experts at the SAP Runs SAP booth on the SAPPHIRE showfloor. These experts have deep knowledge of SAP’s technology, LoB solutions and project experience. The present Global IT Management team has multiple years of experience in IT governance, strategy and management – and many of them will be available at the booth to talk to customers.

For the first time, I will personally host tours of our SAP Runs SAP booth for APJ customers and partners. The one hour walkabout tour around SAP Runs SAP will provide our customers an opportunity to meet the experts. During this tour, we would like to share our innovation practices and experiences with our customers, and learn from them what we could do differently or better.

If you are going to SAPPHIRE Orlando 2013, please drop by the SAP Runs SAP booth. I look forward to meeting you and talking more about enterprise innovation!

Manik N. Saha

CIO – Asia Pacific & Japan

SAP

Learn about SAP’s IT Strategy in the cloud with Sahil Shah’s latest blog.

Martin Reichmann shares his thoughts on the upcoming SAPPHIRENOW in Orlando and what to expect from Ariba and SAP Business in his latest blog.

Read Martin’s blog here.

“A necessity in any workforce is an ongoing conversation between employees and managers on performance expectations and progress as it drives a shared understanding about career goals. 2013 offers a new opportunity to achieve professional success though ongoing conversation and leveraging Success Map, SAP‘s new cloud-based HR solution, business execution tools. Success Map contains systems, processes, and tools to ensure people are in the right jobs, have the right skills and do the right things to grow our business, and achieve our 2015 business strategy.”

Continue to my full blog on Success Map and its business execution tools to find out how to jumpstart your career planning!

Read the blog here.

Written by Axel Buelow, SVP & Head of Application Services

The Migration to HANA should not be seen as a normal, technical database migration. It provides a huge opportunity to positively impact the business – to run faster, smarter and simpler. Companies can and should use their HANA migration to assess which business processes need acceleration or to think about areas where they could run processes differently or even introduce brand-new ones.

In order for this to happen, IT and the business need to collaborate. It’s a process of education. IT can educate the business on HANA’s potential to bring about change. This sparks ideas and the business is able to come up with new and better ways to do things. The business can educate IT on processes, process pain points and new business potential.

I saw this when SAP Global IT implemented HANA for the SAP Facility Management. We now use smart meters to capture energy consumption in our data centers and company facilities and have captured millions of records that provide a real-time view of our energy consumption. We can react now much faster, avoid unnecessary energy consumption and contribute to our sustainability targets. IT couldn’t have built this kind of analysis without the process knowledge of the facilities team.

This is why IT and the business have to collaborate. In our recent CRM on HANA migration, we worked closely with the business. These were our three key steps to collaboration:

1. Roadmap: We had a joint business and IT roadmap, which I referenced in my last blog post [link]. Two years ago, we started with by-side scenarios, which swiftly ramped up our HANA knowledge. Then we implemented BI on HANA, which gave us the chance to test our new apps. And now we are working on our big Business Suite on HANA migrations: CRM on HANA is already migrated, followed by ERP on HANA later this year.
2. Collaboration model:  We established a clear collaboration model, with one CRM on HANA sponsor from the business and one from Global IT. All the HANA responsibilities were bundled under these two sponsors, who had regular meetings to align before reporting jointly to top management.
3. One team: we drew resources from all over SAP, but during the 2.5 month migration of CRM to HANA, we worked as one team under one roof. Our project team came from the business units, Application Services and Infrastructure Services (both within IT), from development and from our support organization. Having such mixed project skills meant that we overcame the project borders and everyone worked as one team. We were partners.

Having had our learning curve with CRM on HANA, we are now working on the ERP on HANA implementation. It is a far larger project for us, with more users, modifications, add-ons and interfaces. However, we are also able to focus on more value scenarios, so will be able to include Fast Closing  and the Financial Cockpit in one program with the migration. The business now better understands the potential that the HANA in-memory technology can provide to them, and we in IT understand much more about business processes and priorities.

(This is the second in series of blog posts on the SAP CRM on HANA go-live. To read the first post on the migration of CRM on HANA please follow this link: “SAP Runs SAP CRM on HANA“.)

After his previous post on how to implement an efficient IT Security Management framework, Maximilian Adrian has now explored the everyday application of security practices. This blog describes the effective use of Operational Security Management in your organization.

Read Max’s blog here.

In this blog, I [David Poisson] will share some examples of solutions that we have delivered at SAP to our internal Lines of Business, and how we can answer our needs using the right technology.”

Read David’s blog here.

Read Meenakshi’s blog here.