2020 SAP Innovation Awards – What Did I See

Last year I was asked to be an SAP Innovation Award Ambassador for the 2020 awards.  I jumped at the opportunity because I really like to see what customers are doing with our solutions and I also was able to participate in selecting some of the finalists as well as help work on putting together some of the submissions.  This allowed me to review hundreds of submissions, and there are some brilliant use cases.

After reviewing so many submissions I wanted to share some of what I thought were areas of technology that were part of many of the Innovation Award submissions.

Integration:

Integration was seen throughout so many of the submission’s.  Of course there was integration to SuccessFactors and S/4 and other SAP solutions, but what I saw more of this year was integration to 3rd Party solutions.  What was great to see was that customers can have all these solutions from different vendors but truly SCP became the center of the spoke and wheel approach.  Submissions integrated to some of the bigger vendors that you might expect like Google, Microsoft, ServiceNow.  What was more interesting to me was integrating with solutions like AusPost for tracking shipments, ESRI for mapping, IBM Watson, Financial institutions, travel sites and more.  I can list so many more, but the idea is that customers are no longer looking for SAP to just work with SAP, they are integrating SAP with solutions that bring so much more to enhance the user experience.  Think about what you could do if you could bring in a 3rd party solution in order to address a business need easier.

IOT:

There were so many interesting submission’s based on IOT.  It was a change from years past where IOT was solving big problems, one that I can remember is using IOT to target disease in an orchard; this year IOT was used to solve big problems but in my mind on smaller scales but would reach more people or devices.  There was a customer who used IOT to make sure their coffee makers were always maintained, filled with coffee and could charge for cups of coffee that were consumed.  There were a few submissions based on companies that used IOT to help ensure processes were followed in their small business so that the quality of their product was always up to standard.  There was of course the submissions that looked at how to solve environmental issues and submissions that are looking to help cities and communities solve problems.  A lot of submissions were tying together IOT with the use of Machine Learning and there were a lot of submission’s that weren’t based on IOT but mentioned that their next phase of their projects would include things like RPA, ML and IOT.  I was also encouraged seeing how many partners are invested in this area.

Mobile:

OK, so for anyone that knows me, I’ve been working in mobile for many years, so I had to bring this up.  There were a number of submissions that used SCP Mobile Services, I saw a lot of iOS SDK solutions, Mobile Cards showed up in one of the submissions, there were a number of SAP Asset Manager mentions which uses our Mobile Development Kit, and all of these are great, but what wasn’t lost on me was how many submissions had mobile as part of their overall solution or as an entry point.  It wasn’t a focus on what they were submitting, but it was often there.  Customers mentioned using Fiori, Portal, UI5, React and of course Mobile Services.  Mobile was used widely as part of the solution, it was as we have said often, an assumed and necessary part of the solution.  I always love seeing mobile as part of the architecture diagram.  Another great thing to mention, the architecture diagrams in the submission’s were awesome!

SAP Analytics Cloud:

I don’t deal with SAC directly, but it was used quite a bit in multiple submissions.  There was a lot of ways customers were consuming the information, either through Fiori Apps, Portal, Dashboard and of course mobile.  It was really great to see how it was consumed to tackle a lot of different ideas.

Those are four areas that I felt were well represented in many of the submissions.  There was also a lot of other technology used.  There were several submissions using SAP solutions that did not use SCP, like Ariba, Qualtrics, SuccessFactors and more, I just happened to be concentrating on SCP.  There was also the use of multiple services, like Workflow, Blockchain, AI, RPA, CAI and more.  These technologies are going to have a tremendous impact now and in the future, and I expect to see a growing number of submissions next year that take advantage of these services.

What I also want to point out is that every customer on SCP can take advantage of all these services.  They can either use them individually, or more importantly put an architecture together that uses many of these services and address bigger business needs and it will provide really good user experience. It’s encouraging to see that with so many submission’s this year, every one of them was unique, solving so many different problems.  I can’t wait to talk to so many of you that put these solutions together, and I can’t wait to see what you have in store for us next year.

I’m always here to listen and see what you have done with SCP, feel free to reach out. Congratulations to all of you who submitted a pitch deck as part of the 2020 SAP Innovation Awards.  In my mind all of the submissions deserved to be winners.  I encourage everyone to go through the entries and see how you can put together a bigger and better architecture using SAP Cloud Platform and SAP.