RDS

Back in May, I had the opportunity to spend time with many customers at SAPPHIRE NOW from Orlando, specifically focused on SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions or RDS for short.  It was great to answer questions and explain more detail about RDS because I think customers can really benefit from these new offerings.  In reflecting upon those discussions and many since – one thing was clear – we need to do more to explain what RDS’ are and why customers should care.

What is an RDS anyway?

Simply put, RDS’ are what the market might generically refer to as a “packaged solution”: a comprehensive and integrated offering that addresses specific business challenges, enabling companies to go live with new software to address these challenges.  The alternative to a packaged solutions approach is for companies to purchase the individual components, such as software and an implementation separately.  We believe the “solution” approach is what customers prefer in most instances, and we are seeing this validated by customers, SAP partners, and industry influencers (analysts and bloggers). 

So back to “what is an RDS?”  Each RDS contains four elements:

  1. Software – modular software that addresses specific business challenges.
  2. Content – SAP best practices, templates, and tools make solution adoption easier.
  3. Enablement – Guides and educational material speed end user adoption and deployment.
  4. Service – a fixed price, fixed scope implementation service to get the package deployed quickly and cost-effectively. 

 

Why Should you Care?

The objective of RDS is to help customers get up and running quickly – usually within a quarter – on SAP software, so they can focus on their business.  We currently have a portfolio of approximately 40 RDS’ and will be rolling out new packages on a quarterly basis to cover more and more business processes.  We are still in early days of this offering type, and are learning and course-correcting every day. 

In future blogs, I’ll discuss the key value drivers:  Predictability, Integration, and Choice as well as provide updates on the RDS portfolio and how the vast SAP Ecosystem supports RDS. 

If there are other topics you want to hear about, or if you you’d like to discuss RDS, let us know.