Business Trends
The Foundation for the Intelligent Enterprise—SAP’s Digital Platform
A key conundrum lies at the heart of every CIO’s decision-making process. Simply put: how to manage and leverage data in the best way possible that maximizes growth and innovation? But, of course, today’s information landscapes are no simple matter. Organizations face a glut of data from a myriad of sources, further complicated by a hodgepodge of disparate storage systems that include various multi-cloud vendors and on-premises repositories. Adding to that information headache – a growing array of digital endpoints, from mobile, connected smart devices to social and business networks to public API ecosystems.
How can businesses forge ahead as Intelligent Enterprises if they are struggling to sift through sprawling data stored in different systems? Or if it is lacking the flexibility to quickly consume data needed to respond to shifting demands and market challenges?
What Is SAP’s Approach to This Data Challenge?
At SAP, we believe that the availability of trusted data provides much needed operational stability within an organization. But stability alone is not enough—a harmonizing layer of agility that can consume and share this trusted data is indispensable for spurring intelligent growth and innovation. That’s why we created the digital platform: to offer both data management and as-a-service application development for a compelling digital foundation that not only unifies data systems and processes, but readies customers to continuously adapt to evolving business and technology conditions.
The digital platform is a single, coherent, unified solution for real-time trusted and managed data availability and rapid cloud application development that leverages cutting-edge services and technologies.
A Stable, Unified Data Landscape
SAP’s digital platform takes advantage of the SAP HANA Data Management suite to help organizations execute best-in-class data practices for a secure and governed approach that brings stability to and confidence in its data systems and processes. Fragmented IT landscapes can be overhauled by integrating disparate on-premises and cloud-based systems to unify structured and unstructured data, analytics, and business processes across the organization. SAP HANA Data Management suite supplies the Intelligent Enterprise with all the tools it needs—including access and process controls, data privacy encryption, masking, and anonymization functionality—to manage and orchestrate all corporate data on a single platform.
Driving Business Innovation
A comprehensive, powerful and flexible layer of agility—the SAP Cloud Platform—sits above the stable data management foundation to complete the digital platform. Providing essential as-a-service components and development tools within one integrated platform, new applications can be rapidly created, or current applications can be extended, to analyze and share the trusted data that sits within the digital platform. And, over a thousand ready-made applications that leverage SAP’s trusted business knowledge and data are available for any customer to leverage. This layer of agility is indispensable to organizations who wish to make meaning of data both within and outside the enterprise by putting it into the hands of decision-makers to drive business innovation.
Deployment Flexibility
With a multi-cloud environment based on open standards, the digital platform also offers complete deployment flexibility and freedom of movement for data and applications. It adapts to any organization’s hybrid and multi-cloud needs—adding value to any existing cloud infrastructure, including hyperscale cloud vendors.
The Intelligent Enterprise
SAP’s digital platform offers a simple, elegant solution to the often-overwhelming task of data management while attempting to foster the innovation necessary for growth in today’s whirlwind marketplace. Rooted in decades of business knowledge and expertise, the stability and agility offered by the digital platform’s unified data landscape and powerful application development provides the foundation for organizations endeavoring to become an Intelligent Enterprise.
IDC Webinar: Break the Digital Deadlock to Transform Your Business
Watch our on-demand webinar, Pathways to the Intelligent Enterprise ,with Phil Carter, Chief Analyst, IDC Europe and Dan Kearnan, Senior Director of Marketing, SAP, who share how organizations are adopting digital platform technologies that help them compete in this fast paced digital economy.
Learn More
- To learn more about how to reimagine your business model for a competitive edge, read the IDC Spotlight, “Why Companies Fail at Digital Transformation: Clearing the Road to the Intelligent Enterprise
- Stay tuned here for more installments in The Digital Platform Blog Series