Just coming back from a IT leadership meeting in Mexico, giving an update on SAP´s Cloud Strategy. One of the interesting questions was about the impact of trends like Mobility and inMemory to Cloud.
Same as during Sapphire in Madrid, I did use the below example to explain how it will potentially play together and why our customers are so keen to see this trends merge at SAP. Kudos again to my colleagues who helped to craft this example.
I thought it would be of interest for some to share, makes the topic somehow more tangible…
SAP is clearly has a differentiated strategy from other vendors in the market. Why is SAP’s approach the right approach to creating a cloud?
“Let’s imagine a company in 2015 and let’s talk about what it might need.”
Let’s take a simple example – that of a store in 2015. In 2015, everyone will have mobile devices (smart phones, tablets). Mobile commerce will be increasingly important
- Imagine a customer walking by a store …
- The mobile device will indicate the customer’s location
- Location service will tell you whether the customer has “checked in” to this store before
- The customer’s credit score will provide some information on likelihood of purchase
- Poor score = heavily in debt, therefore less likely to buy; Good score = means to purchase
- This store’s inventory will give you one data point on whether they should run a promotion
- And a read of all stores in the chain… will give you further data on whether they need to
- Historical promotion data will tell you how much of a discount the store should offer – and will tell what you should offer
And you have 2 seconds in which to collect this data, process it, and return it in the form of a coupon to the customer’s mobile device before the customer walks by!
Now imagine this scenarios repeated across the country… with millions of customers, thousands of locations, and hundreds of items! Now let’s see what it will take to solve this problem:
- You will need mobile device management
- You will need Connectivity among
- Retail stores
- Retail chain HQ [and its most probably an on-premise system]
- 3rd party data providers [e.g. location services, credit scores]
- You will need a cloud based infrastructure to:
- Provide connectivity & integration
- Enable scalability
- Deliver business processes
- You will need Big Data / fast analytics
- You will need a business process management foundation, for example to provide
- Inventory visibility across stores
- End to end business process management from collecting information to issuing the promotion
So as you can see in this scenario is mobile management, cloud based connectivity, hybrid and orchestrated OnPremise and OnDemand, big data analytics, and business process management.
And that is the combination that SAP is building in its product strategy, embracing the power of innovation via cloud and inMemory. And this is what differentiates SAP in the market
Check as recorded video under www.sapphirenow.com or direct link viahttp://www.sapvirtualevents.com/sapphirenow/sessiondetails.aspx?sId=815
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