By Dan Lahl, Global Vice President of SAP Business Technology Platform Marketing & Solutions, SAP
Despite an unstable business environment of supply chain pressures, inflation, skills gaps, and talk of recession, some midsize companies are not just surviving – they're thriving. New products are innovated to attract broader market interest, while existing brands expand into additional markets, categories, and segments. In essence, the midmarket is where many innovations are being incubated and tested out for fast and agile success.
According to the IDC InfoDoc, "
A Guide to Growth," these high-growth companies expect to increase their revenue and market share by nearly 11% within the next 12 months. Behind this expansion, the secret for 81% of these high-growth respondents lies in heavy investment in technology, such as ERP, data analytics, data management, automation, business networks, digital supply chains, power-user enablement, and various line-of-business solutions.
As exciting as these outcomes may be, infusing multiple new technologies into an IT landscape could become too complicated, disconnected, and unwieldy to manage and use for future innovation. However, it’s possible to avoid this risk by leveraging a cloud-based business technology platform that services the above digital investments and provides the flexibility, extensibility, and openness to meet specific challenges and realize targeted results.
Where "all things digital" come together
While a business technology platform is reasonably new, the questions that led to its design have been on the minds of many business leaders over the past few years:
- "What if my entire company could pull the technologies it needs, when needed, without disrupting operations with a continuous stream of implementation cycles?”
- “What if my IT team and business leaders could use the same business platform for agile innovation?”
In addition to those thoughts, midsize businesses have gradually shifted their digital transformation focus to a more urgent desire: quickly scale "all things digital" to anticipate change, respond to risk, and innovate to seize emerging opportunities.
With a business technology platform–based approach, midsize companies can select the technologies they need now, then adopt new ones as their business situation, market condition, and customer demand evolve. All the while, they only pay for the capabilities they actively use.
Over the course of using a business technology platform, midsize companies gradually simplify their IT landscape, even as they continue to build on their innovations by adopting more technologies available on the platform. They can tap into a host of prebuilt content to dramatically accelerate response to customer needs while saving time and money. In addition, they can benefit from cost efficiencies and fast-paced innovation thanks to instant access to cloud technologies.
Rapid transformation through buildable innovation
Black Horse One is a prime example of a midsize company delivering outsized outcomes with a business technology platform. The sports technology provider has developed and delivered many applications and experiences that are changing the equestrian and dressage world by streamlining the most complex and exacting aspect of all equestrian and dressage events – in-person presence, extensive paperwork, and a laborious scoring system.
Through a business technology platform, Black Horse One has created a suite of applications based on a high-performance data infrastructure. The innovations enable real-time data access with a cloud database that integrates data from multiple sources – including GraphQL APIs, Simple Text-Orientated Messaging Protocol (STOMP), and various global organizations – and securely stores it in one place.
The applications’ design contains powerful processing capabilities needed to deliver data instantly and reliably from all over the world and support quick response times and fallbacks. As a result, competitions run more efficiently with less overhead and easier preparation, and riders can train remotely and receive paperless results from judges on their mobile devices. Fans are even more engaged through AI-enabled live video streams and access to one source for accurate competition statistics.
An opportunity for driving measurable impact
No matter how well or poorly the economy is performing, every business wants to become a high-growth company. But making that leap requires the innovative capacity to bring to life new ways to operate and compete in a digital-first world.
For midsize companies, that level of success is well within their reach. By leveraging a cloud-based business technology platform, they can acquire the technology architecture they need to build on top of existing innovations, extend capabilities business-wide, and gain the openness to scale as needed.
Discover how a business technology platform can turn your midsize business into a high-growth competitor. View our infographic, "Adapt to Change at the Speed of Business with SAP Business Technology Platform."
This article was previously posted on
Forbes.com
