SAP Gains Valuable Insights into Development and Planning in Higher Education industry
Palo Alto, CA –
SAP hosted over 25 CIOs from prestigious Universities around the world on April 22-23 in their Silicon Valley offices.
The goal was to trade executive perspectives on industry developments and trends, and to share the SAP development roadmap for technology planning. The expectations were more than well met.
The Higher Education and Research Advisory Committee is one of the strongest advisory councils in SAP. The comprehensive expertise of the committee members coupled with a consistently open and collaborative forum continues to assist SAP in accelling in meeting industry customer needs and expectations in the utilization of SAP software solutions.
Perhaps not surprisingly, significant discussion concerned efforts to gravitate SAP solutions to the cloud. Advisory committee member institutions are at
very different stages of cloud adoption, with EMEA institutions far behind the adoption curve; mostly due to regional challenges as opposed to institution
challenges.
SAP assured all committee members that traditional SAP on premise enterprise solutions would continue to be supported, and would continue
to receive development funding for upgrades and maintenance. Cloud-based solutions were to be made available as “options” for institutions to consider, not as replacements.
Additional significant discussion also centered on the SAP user interface (UI) and overall user experience. Committee members felt that SAP UI is
outdated and cumbersome. Sam Yen, Principal Global SAP UI Architect outlined, in detail, the current and planned changes to the UI, and hinted that major announcements will soon be made that SAP customers would be “very happy about.”
Other significant topics included:
- Strategic Partnership supporting HER
- HANA for Education
- Strategy and Future Direction for SAP Analytics
Lastly, Gerardo Kobeh, SAP Chief Product Owner for Public Services and Healthcare strategic industry outlined planned innovations for SAP, and detailed where targeted investments would/could be made, and outlined detail into the SAP development roadmap for the next 2-3 years.
The committee is scheduled for a six month review to discuss action items, and will meet on an ad hoc basis to address any major announcements
and/or developments over the next few months.