If you've found your way to reading this post, you already have a predisposition to SAP - a positive one I would hope. You already know SAP is the world's largest supplier of business applications. But what you may not know is that SAP has a services business nearly equal to that of our software business. Seriously? (you may ask) ... Seriously! (I would answer)
SAP Services is comprised of 4 major lines of business - consulting, education, custom development, and support. But I'm guessing how SAP Services is organized is not so interesting to you quite frankly. It is how SAP Services can help you drive more business value from your SAP software. At SAP, we feel there are four strategic areas and business challenges our various service portfolios can help you get more out of your software.
- 1. Business Transformation - helping you leverage your software to better align your IT departments with your corporate strategy. This is the "Strategy & Design" phases of your projects or implementations. Identify what do you want to get done with our software, and then design how the software will do it.
- 2. Business Insight - services around business intelligence, information and performance management, and compliance. These help you unlock the insights hidden within your organization's data ... getting the information to the managers and employees that need it to make the right decisions day-to-day.
- 3. IT Transformation - helping you optimize your system landscapes, system operations, or technology strategies to reduce IT costs and support improved business performance. These would fall into "Operations & Continual Improvement" phases. Now that you have systems, how do you make them run better and, let's face it, save money?
- 4. Enablement & Education - assisting you in educating your SAP users and reducing your overall training costs. And we're not just talking about traditional classroom training, but online and self-guided training as well. We even have competitive business simulation gaming applications to make learning more engaging.
Not only can SAP Services partner with you in the above strategic areas to help you drive down your IT costs, but also help you extend your solutions with custom development and in the end, help you support your SAP software with the most complete software maintenance portfolio.
Your company (and maybe even you personally) decided to partner with SAP to run your critical business systems. Now it's time to partner with SAP Services to help you run better.
This is the first posting in what I hope will be a continual dialog around SAP Services. I need to emphasize DIALOG. So I would love to hear your ideas, questions and comments around the services from SAP! Or if you'd like to see something else written about or, heaven forbid, actually answered ... this is the place. Lastly, you may ask "why does this guy care?" Excellent question! It's my job to care. I've been at SAP for 13 years now in a number of positions. I now have the pleasure of running a portion of our Services Marketing department, and you can say I'm partially responsible for any confusing messaging you may read. If you can't understand it (rumor has it SAP can complicate things a bit), then it is my teams fault, and ultimately mine. I want to correct that wherever I can. So I'm starting here.
You can expect to see various Services topics written about here. Mainly around how we feel SAP Services can help you lower your IT operations costs and make you run better. But you will ultimately be the judge of that. I'll also post some questions if my team is in the need to hear what our customers think about "this" or "that". I hope you're good with that, and I really hope to talk to you soon. Learn more about SAP Services at www.sap.com/services
