5 Reasons for SAP Cloud Platform

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At SAPPHIRENOW recently, I was honored to share the stage with Hasso Plattner. In this blog I will revisit some of the key messages I shared, and more detail on the role of SAP Cloud Platform in an intelligent enterprise.



Let’s start by defining intelligence. It is about taking past experience, learning from it, turning it into knowledge and applying it to new problems. For business, it’s also about speed and precision. How you apply it, gives you the competitive edge. It reduces your cycle time and makes you deliver better towards customer experience. It’s not just about speed of execution either, it’s about the speed at which you can apply change to changing market conditions, to changing customer behavior and demands and that’s what gives your business, business agility. If your business requires you to remain innovative and differentiating then there’s only one answer, and that’s SAP Cloud Platform.

Here’s 5 reasons why:

1. SAP Cloud Platform is the best extension platform for any SAP application, whether on premise or in the cloud. We have all learned the hard way, what it means to over customize systems. We’ve all learned what it means to over customize ERP systems. It slowed down the ability to keep up with the speed of innovation that we were delivering, and what the market was bringing to life.  We want to be smarter and more intelligent about this in the future, so let’s add extensions to your applications in a side-by-side fashion outside the core system. Let’s keep the core clean so that you can keep innovating with us and bring your specific extensions to the outside world.


2. We have the most holistic integration platform as part of SAP Cloud Platform. Because business processes don’t only run within a single line of business solution, they of course run across a set of those solutions. If you talk about lead to cash, if you talk about holistic workforce management, if you talk procure to pay, if you talk about how you connect front office with your back office, this is all going across. If you talk about SAP to SAP integration or SAP to third party integration, this is how you run your business, and as you apply intelligence to these business processes, it becomes even more important to take larger context into consideration and have an integrated view across all of the assets that you deploy in your environment. This is why we push and focus so much on SAP Cloud Platform integration services as the one and single simple integration solution for all SAP to SAP, and SAP to third party integration purposes. We have gained over 5,000 customers using that solution already today.


3. It’s a powerful build platform. What is build? If we think about scenarios, which are not just an extension to a SAP solution, if this is an innovative and differentiating solution that you build somewhere specifically for your business needs, which you connect back into an SAP driven back-end process, that is what we call a build case. I’ll give you an example, we have a customer who has built an airplane fueling application on mobile devices, which replaced a paper driven process and connected that back into S/4HANA for fulfillment purposes, that’s a build case. That’s where SAP Cloud Platform and Leonardo services like machine learning, like analytics, like big data, like IoT come together to build powerful new solutions.


4. Unique experience platform. As processes turn into intelligent ones, the way end-users interact with systems is going to fundamentally change. The process triggers human interaction in the future. Systems alert you to exceptional situations in your, for example, supply chain. Applications, make recommendations on how to best act in certain situations. So, the way how people interact, your customers or your end users, your workforce with your particular systems is going to change. Machine Learning, conversational UI’s, chatbots. We all know those new technologies. How you use planning, predictive and analytics capabilities in a holistic solution, how you bring all of those together is changing the way how you work with system. It’s an ERP you can talk to, it’s a CRM that you can listen to. That’s how things are going to change.


5. It’s an agile platform. What I mean by that is, that’s the place, where speed meets scale. Its where experimentation meets productization. It’s where your millennial software developer meets Chief Security Officer, Chief Data Protection Officer, Chief Compliance Officer. That’s where Proof of Concept meets production robustness. In the end, it’s where Cool hangs out with Enterprise. It’s where the cool sh*t happens.

So, this is SAP Cloud Platform in a nutshell for you. It’s a platform that has also profoundly changed how we deliver innovations at SAP. And you know the old times when we had long release cycles and you had even longer adoption cycles. With SAP Cloud Platform, and the services we have there, we are in the meantime delivering full releases every 2 weeks in a zero-downtime fashion into our 40, public cloud SAP Cloud Platform landscapes. We have several hundred updates every year that we are providing without any downtime. That’s the speed at which we can bring innovation to you in an ongoing fashion.

 

You can find out more about SAP Cloud Platform here.

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