SAP on the Cloud

Removing HR Blind Spots

October 24, 2012 by Sven Denecken

Managing the HR function is a bit like driving a car.  Things are fast paced.  Potential dangers lurk around every corner.  Yet somehow we’re able to safely navigate.   That is until we’re caught off-guard.  It’s the car in our blind spot that causes the accident.  So what’s the parallel to HR?  It’s the question we didn’t ask that comes back to haunt us.  Think about it.  By the time we launch a query, we already suspect something.  All we’re doing is looking for data to validate and quantify what we already suspect.

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SAP Business ByDesign: an integral part of SAP’s Cloud portfolio

May 21, 2012 by Schalk Viljoen

Guest blog by Lars Dalgaard, SAP Executive Board member, Founder and CEO of SuccessFactors

SAPPHIRE NOW was both exhilarating and inspiring. Our Cloud strategy around a loosely-coupled solutions suite focused on key assets our large enterprise customers care most about – people, money, customers and suppliers – resonated well with our customers, prospects, partners and influencers. Obviously, not everything can be communicated exhaustively during a short keynote, and some questions remained around our approach of providing an end-to-end suite as part of our overall Cloud portfolio.

To reiterate our commitment to the suite, some key points I’ve stated regarding SAP Business ByDesign:

#1 – SAP Business ByDesign plays a strategic role within our overall Cloud portfolio. With more than 1,000 customers around the world, educated consultants and developers, it is the right solution for upper mid-market companies and subsidiaries of large enterprises. In fact, interest in ByDesign during SAPPHIRE NOW was huge.

#2 – SAP Business ByDesign is a beautiful product. I can say this because we use it! All of Successfactors now runs on ByDesign and our other SAP Cloud solutions. My team implemented all components including financials, project management, order processing and purchasing in just 10 weeks for more than 1,800 users. We are our solution’s biggest fans (and critics). We’ll be closing our bookings starting in May with ByDesign. SuccessFactors, Inc. is no longer transacting on any non-SAP Cloud financial solutions, including Netsuite and OpenAir. By June 1, 2012, all access – including SuccessFactors’ foreign subsidiaries – to non-SAP Cloud financial solutions will be terminated.

#3 – Partners are vital to SAP Business ByDesign’s success. Partners today can re-sell, implement and extend ByDesign. They take the solution into additional industries and countries, which may not currently be on our roadmap. Together with our partners, we will evaluate which solution extensions and potential verticals add most commercial value to our customers.

With focused go-to-market and streamlined implementation methodology to further accelerate our customers’ go-live and time-to-value, SAP Business ByDesign is an integral part of SAP’s Cloud portfolio.

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Watch this excerpt from Lars’ Keynote on YouTube where he expands on SAP Business ByDesign , SAP Business One and the SAP Cloud Portfolio

Read the transcript

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 Lars Dalgaard joined SAP to run a newly formed Cloud Business Unit when SAP acquired SuccessFactors, the company he founded in 2001. As a member of the SAP Executive Board and the SAP Global Managing Board, Lars Dalgaard owns all responsibility around the company’s Cloud business including strategy, product development, and all related go-to-market capabilities.

Lars has an undying passion for releasing the magic of every person in and outside the workplace. Since Dalgaard founded SuccessFactors in the middle of the worst tech crisis in history, SuccessFactors has had a compound annual revenue growth rate of approximately 75 percent, with annual revenue of $328 million. It was the fastest growing business application cloud company of its size and the second largest in revenue – delivering 19 cloud applications to enable business execution.

Detailed biography

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. Below we have recorded a short video, highlighting the key aspects of SAP´s cloud strategy.

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SAPPHIRE NOW Cloud Campus: 6 Sessions You Don’t Want to Miss

April 25, 2012 by Carolyn Brock

I’ll be at SAPPHIRE NOW from Orlando this year, and, like most attendees, I’m planning my agenda. My home base will be the Cloud Campus, featuring 5 topics:

• Application Services (which also feature solutions from our partners)
• SuccessFactors Solutions
• Collaboration Services
• Cloud Technology

The Cloud Campus offers demonstrations and discussions about SAP’s newest cloud solutions for Finance, Sales, and Procurement. If you are interested in Human Capital Management (HCM) you’ll find sessions featuring SuccessFactors, a new subsidiary and a leader in cloud computing. Also check out the test drive area where you can get hands on experience with our solutions via various mobile devices.

Consider adding the following six sessions to your agenda. All sessions take place in the Cloud Campus Theatre. And, if you are wanting to develop a master plan for your company’s cloud strategy, be sure to send someone to the ASUG Cloud Preconference Day Seminar.

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The ASUG Virtualization & Cloud Influence Council: Your Company’s Cloud Advocate

April 20, 2012 by Greg Chase

Guest post by Alexa McVey

If there’s one thing that SAP Virtualization Week 2012 has shown, migrating a company’s SAP practice into the cloud is not a simple project.

 
At the SAP 2012 Virtualization and Cloud Week here in Palo Alto, California, I caught up with Arthur Fleiss, who serves in his spare time as Chairman of the ASUG Virtualization and Cloud Influence Council. matter, and having other industry peers to share experience with is incredibly valuable.

Arthur is a software industry veteran, and works as IT architect at SAP customer Colgate-Palmolive.  Arthur was kind enough to explain how the ASUG Virtualization and Cloud Influence Council represents the interests of SAP customers that are moving into the cloud, and the advantages they and their employees can gain by becoming involved with the council.

The Future is in The Clouds

April 17, 2012 by Brad Smith

Presented by SAP DNA CIS Team – located in Moscow, focused on industry solutions in the SME and LE segment, the team help customers to  understand how their business can Run Better.

The Future is in the clouds, but it doesn’t mean there have to be any additional troubles or doubts. You can be sure that your business in the clouds will be successful. At this moment, the Software as a Service market has huge potential for growth. According to a Gartner analysis the SaaS market volume will increase three times by 2015. Recent research shows that 95% of today’s SaaS customers are going to use cloud solutions in the future. It is remarkable that in Russia cloud solutions are still quite a new topic. The Russian SaaS market is at the beginning of its career. Even more interestingly there aren’t any really strong players in the game yet. This means we should expect a real boom in the near future. (Interesting fact: the global market of SaaS solutions has experienced a boom after the financial crisis). It’s estimated, that this year the worldwide SaaS market will grow by 20%. For Russia as emerging market we can assume that growth will be even faster: some estimates talk about 100% growth of the Russian cloud market by 2015.

SAP as a leader in business software has all chances to bring its volume in this growth. Cloud computing technologies already play a vital part of the SAP innovative portfolio. “You’ll see that the SAP Cloud will be an important focus for us, and it will be a broad, comprehensive cloud strategy.”, said co-CEO Bill McDermott in InformationWeek in November 2011. One step was the acquisition of SuccessFactors – a company that focuses on cloud-based solutions for human capital management. Today it is one of the biggest players on the SaaS marketplace. SuccessFactor’s solutions enhance efficiency in all strategic HR processes: performance, compensation, recruiting and learning. Together with SAP, SuccessFactors will help businesses run better by providing innovative products for wide audiences. As SuccessFactor‘s CEO Lars Dalgaard said to Forbes: “Together, there is no doubt in my mind that SuccessFactors and SAP will delight our customers and build the most beautiful products in the industry”.

What are the benefits of using SaaS-based products for you? In which areas can cloud technology be of help in your HR Department? First of all, SaaS technology provides operational reliability and availability of IT services, as well as operational flexibility and scalability of IT resource. You can reduce risk in deploying and implementing information systems.

In addition, SaaS solutions help to save costs and optimize investments in IT. With HR SaaS you:

• can store information about your staff in a safe place including their full history and activities (training, practice, experience, responsibilities and opportunities).
• receive the possibility of easy access to a unified database of employees.
• Enable your HR managers to rapidly generate reports.

For more information visit SAP Cloud Solution for you or follow us on the Twitter @DNAMoscow

As planned – last check on HCM roadmap before SAPphire and SuccessConnect in May/June…

April 9, 2012 by Sven Denecken

As discussed in March, here are some of the most interesting updates on the HCM roadmap based on various interactions with customers and partners.

And we are building on what we discussed couple of weeks ago, moving forward in two categories:

• Hybrid Deployment

• Leverage combination of cloud and on-premise HCM solutions
• Deploy market -leading talent capabilities from SuccessFactors in the cloud
• Leverage delivered integrations between SuccessFactors and SAP
• Leverage existing on-premise Core HR investments

• Full Cloud
  • Acceleration of Employee Central to offer end-to-end cloud-based HCM

Most questions while discussing with customers and partners have been around integration at hybrid deployments in our installed base. Here we moved ahead with data and process integration supported by the respective integration toolset, but as well on user experience with unified access to all HCM processes.

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SAP Store Fuels the Cloud

March 29, 2012 by Brad Smith

A Guest Blog Post Written by Darryl Gray

The latest release of the SAP Store has just been unveiled following CEBIT, and there is a lot to be excited about! SAP continues to expand our cloud offerings, with the recent acquisition of SuccessFactors, the rollout of SAP Sales OnDemand, introduction of SAP Travel OnDemand mobile apps, and reaching the milestone in December of more than 1,000 customers running our cloud suite, the SAP Business ByDesign solution. And the SAP Store is helping fuel this growth to make SAP the #1 cloud software provider in the world.

With this recent release of the SAP Store, we have doubled the number of solutions for SAP Business ByDesign to over 120 – all available for our customers to discover, evaluate, and buy to help them run better. The SAP Store includes key forms and reports for your analytic and reporting needs, mashups to popular apps like Google Maps integration, mobile applications so you can view your app for SAP Business ByDesign on your iPhone or Android, and additional extensions and microvertical applications to serve your specific business needs whether you run a professional services organization or operate a sports venue. Here are a few highlights of some exciting new apps and functionality you’ll find on the SAP Store:

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SAP and SuccessFactors – this combination is about acceleration, not consolidation

February 26, 2012 by Sven Denecken

During the multiple briefings and interviews in the last days in preparation and following the product announcement SAP and SuccesFactors Accelerate Unified Product Direction, here are the top / most asked questions and the answers that we would like to share. We hope this helps, especially as we did receive so much positive feedback on being:

-       quick in making decisions

-       open in sharing so our customers and partner do know what we will do

-       proactive in reaching out to the influencers and press with rich content and open for all questions and answers

We do thank you for this feedback, it is very encouraging for this team that worked hard on the topics once we were allowed to share and collaborate more intensively.

This is just the start, as we will communicate more as soon as we have it baked, but we firmly believe it is important to push back on marketing-ish pasturing of evident problems in strategy, product overlap and needed decisions.

After all this acquisition is all about growth and acceleration, not about consolidation. We would like to call this a merger. Our customers and partners will win.

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