Getting started: A great time to come to finance

For some people, a new job is a lot like a new piece of technology. In the beginning you just cant wait to get started. The first days you can’t think of anything else as you’re fully focused trying to appreciate every little detail about it. While you slowly grow accustomed to the changes it made to your life, you might forget what made you so eager about it in the first place. In the end it becomes an asset like every other, only reminding you what it added to your life rarely – or when it’s gone.

In technology every now and then a product comes along and breaks this vicious circle of innovation, seemingly unable to lose it’s spark. Even years later it can make you think – man this is cool – I’m glad I live to see the future as some people imagined it years ago.

For me HANA is one of those technologies. Even though we at SAP keep telling the HANA story for years, it still makes me wonder what possibilities remain hidden, what else is going to change in the future, ultimately made possible by HANA? In the past year, the picture of what it would change next (if not everything), got a lot clearer.

When I started with marketing in LOB Finance, I didn’t know what to expect from the new role. Although I was eager to start fresh with marketing, the world of finance software hadn’t really hit me as spectacular, as exciting. It had never made the impression of something you would actually hope to be your field when talking of a transfer to marketing. Only four weeks in and all I can say is – how little did I know! Right now Finance probably is as exciting as it can get and a lot more than I would have expected. Actually I have trouble thinking of another area with this kind of momentum.

Because what I never thought about when thinking of business finances was, how drastically the digital revolution drives change in that area. Of course I always concerned myself with changes in the market, changes in user habits – but how the change of user behavior in the end influences business needs and forces whole industries to rethink the way they handle their finances – I never realized that.  The new way people interact with their surroundings and live their private – and their professional lives – enabled by modern technology – it creates a need for business finances to go real-time, possibly forever changing the whole financial dynamic.

At SAP, this is just an amazing time to come to finance. Because now, standing on the shoulders of HANA, we can actually realize that. On his keynote at SAPInsider GRC2015, Thack Brown hit the mark when he said:

“What we talked about last year, were finance needs to go, this year – finance is there.”

Simple Finance is where financials need to go. And for us at SAP – that’s where our new journey begins.

Like I have already said – it’s just a great time to come to finance.