Improve the UX of SAP Cloud Platform – SAP workshop at SOA People

[tamasszirtes]

While the news is full with the conflict with North-Korea, there is another battle going on, luckily much more peaceful, the “battle of cloud platforms”. The battle takes place on 3 levels: SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. SAP has market-leading solutions in the SaaS arena; think of Concur, SuccessFactors, Ariba, etc. S/4HANA Cloud is quite new in this space, but growing fast. IaaS is an area, where SAP has its own data center offering, but is heavily partnering with the leaders such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. When it comes to Paas, the SAP Cloud Platform is growing at an impressive speed, in terms of services, technology maturity, and supported business use cases. Furthermore, SAP introduced Leonardo, a whole system of innovation, which is also running on this SAP Cloud Platform.

SAP is obviously constantly improving their products and specifically in the area of the Cloud Platform, they have decided to research the end-to-end journey of customers and partners using the SAP Cloud Platform from an initial idea to trial phase, the buying experience, the development journey, going live and operation, etc. In order to improve this journey, SAP listens to customers and partner to have a deeper understanding how they use SAP Cloud Platform for their business.





I learned few months ago that the SAP Design team was looking for customers and partners to share their experience. At SOA People we are glad to be able to be part of such a project, because we invest heavily in SCP and the improvements will be clearly for our benefit too. After a few emails back and forth, we had the setup of the workshop and the people on both sides.

Just last week the SAP team (user researchers, a dev architect and a product owner) came from Walldorf to our office in Nieuwegein to have the UX workshop and discuss our thoughts on SCP. On our side, sales and pre-sales colleagues and myself as architect joined.

We started with the way how we as an SAP partner moved from classic consulting into the cloud world, explained how we approach our customers to help them address their business requirements and recommend on the architectural side how to best implement SCP. We shared our project experience from many different projects, our way of working and, yes, our challenges as well.

For us as a partner, the things around SCP are not less important that the platform itself, so we were happy to discuss the end-to-end experience with a special focus on:

• how to improve the sales cycles to win over competition


• aspects in licensing and clear and market-compatible prices


• some ideas for the commercialization of the platform


• how we could facilitate architecture decisions more easily and


• our need for tools to support jump-start development, e.g. for POCs

We are looking forward to see the outcome of this co-innovation from Teched onwards.