SAP on the Cloud

Applying SAP co-innovation practice to the SuccessFactors portfolio

May 16, 2012 by Sven Denecken

In a previous blog, we outlined the importance of co-innovation in designing next generation talent management solutions. Co-innovation@SAP isn’t just white paper theory, we actually put it into practice. When you need to rethink and deliver something new to the market, making the customer part of the product management team is definitely the best strategy.

With the acquisition of Success Factors by SAP, the game has changed.  Now we are able to refocus on applying co-innovation to a robust portfolio of SuccessFactor products .

We are currently managing three co-innovation projects with SuccessFactors:  Talent Management, Employee Central (core HCM) and Integration to SAP HCM.

In addition, we are applying the intellectual property from SAP Career OnDemand into the talent management portfolio of SuccessFactors. The concepts that we co developed with customers in more than 250 hours of co-innovation sessions are now leveraged by the product management teams from both SAP and SuccessFactors.

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SAP Cloud Strategy – what is next? Focus, execution, customer MUST win!

May 15, 2012 by Sven Denecken

Today, we publicly talked about our cloud strategy in Orlando – with many customers, media, influencers. Thanks you all for the awesome feedback. Now, it’s time to bring some key elements to those who could not attend SAPPHIRENOW physically or virtually.

At SAP, we see the Cloud as a way to deliver new possibilities to our customers that will help them run better & faster.  These new possibilities include:

• New economics that make it possible to do more with IT
• Closer alignment between IT and business needs
• Greater business agility
• More fluid team collaboration
• Increased context aware decision making
• Accelerated development and deployment of custom apps
• Better access to innovations from an ecosystem of independent software developers

Although the market sees social, mobile and big data as separate trends,

we see all of them as essential elements of our Cloud solutions.  Our Cloud solutions are designed to work the way people do. Let’s have a closer look.

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How Do You Protect Information In & From the Cloud?

May 14, 2012 by Brad Smith

A Guest Blog Post by Robert Mol, Symantec

The more I’m on the road meeting with customers, partners and industry colleagues, the more I’m convinced we’ve come to a crossroads, where traditional client server IT is now finally giving way to a more flexible and accessible information-driven alternative.

This may be familiar to many already; however there’s no doubt that a sea change is taking place in the conversations on this subject from a year ago compared with where we are today. The underpinnings of that change are not entirely driven by technology but by the world of the Digital Native. The Digital Native was born into a world of Internet, readily available access to all information and having an “always connected” lens on the world. The Digital Native uses his or her social networks to communicate, is open about it, and only engages with the enterprise if enabled to interact in this relatively new form.

Why, you might think is this relevant to a discussion about Cloud and protecting the information within? The answer lies in the hardware of choice for the Digital Native: the mobile device. These powerful, smart and instant on devices are used by the Digital Native to work and play freely in a connected world. This phenomenon has taken the industry by storm and is making IT managers gasp for air as they try to keep their IT structures aligned and protected. The access anywhere principle of mobile has given Cloud its next reason for existence.

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Does ASUG Need a Cloud Special Interest Group?

May 12, 2012 by Greg Chase

There are big schisms in the world of cloud computing. As a marketer for SAP’s broad portfolio of cloud offerings, it’s actually quite a headache for me. I’m not complaining about organizational nonsense at SAP in this case. Our organization is simply a manifestation of these schisms.

Simplistic explanations about the layers of the cloud: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Platform. The IaaS gals are helping your IT department build or upgrade your data center, and are talking to them about virtualizing and migrating on premise software into a public or private cloud. They don’t get along very well with the SaaS guys who are selling point solutions to your departmental managers, blithely saying “do away with the IT department” and “don’t worry about the company as a whole!” And nobody likes the PaaS geeks – they’re even more annoying than normal developers because they’re doing that agile development thing and are thus making demands on core IT for support a lot more often.

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Trucks, Beer and Band-aid: Why SAPPHIRE NOW is buzzing about B2B and EDI

May 10, 2012 by emmapaver

Guest post by Siddharth Taparia,  SAP

With Sapphire literally hours away, there is a lot of buzz about some of the areas that SAP has moved to in the recent months and new solutions SAP is offering to its customers. One such area is Business Networks and information exchange between businesses (B2B).

When SAP announced the acquisition of Crossgate Inc. in fall of 2011, there was a lot of interest and some (usual) skepticism from SAP’s customers. What does it mean for their current B2B providers? What is SAP’s strategy in Business Networks? Is SAP going to make a foray into the cloud based supplier and customer networks? How does B2B collaboration relate to the more common business social collaboration? Well, attendees both physical and virtual will get a lot of questions answered at SAPPHIRE NOW 2012.

To begin with customers will be able to listen to several success stories of real world companies using B2B integration solutions at SAPPHIRE. I will be hosting a panel on Wednesday at 2 pm with Jason Bannister from Johnson and Johnson and Corey Marshall from Molson Coors called “Move Your B2B EDI Strategy to the Cloud with SAP Solutions”. Jason will also be providing a deep dive on the J&J B2B story on Tuesday at 5:30 pm called “Improve Your Supply Chain and Procurement with EDI in the Cloud”. In addition, Giacomo Coppi from Artoni Trasporti will talk on Monday at 10:30 am about how Italy’s largest transportation provider is using SAP Information Interchange OnDemand to connect with their customers.

Sound interesting? Well this is just the start. There will be over ten micro forums, ASUG sessions, demo-theatre sessions and a dedicated discussion table (CL 515) and test drive area for customers to better understand, experience and learn about the full suite of Collaboration and Business Network solutions. You can meet these and other great customers and SAP experts on-site. Download this calendar invite to get all the sessions on your calendar.