Why do we need to change?
Customers today are looking for ways to transform their business and cater to our digitized, networked, and complex world. They need to deliver services rather than products, and everything needs to happen fast, so innovation with speed is key. The digital transformation is in full swing, and you need to be acting now.
Complexity must first be tackled to help businesses run simple, but simplicity is hard to achieve if companies are not able to choose their pace of change or to flexibly decide where to start. Learn more about the necessities of mastering the digital transformation in our whitepaper here.
What can be done to help?
Our vision is to help customers run simple in a complex world. For over 40 years, we have been the leader in business solutions, working closely with customers to identify the most complex tasks across lines of business in all industries and co-innovate to solve them. Our goal, now more than ever, is to deliver solutions that are easy to consume and operate.
To help our customers stay competitive in today's digital world, our strategy is based on three pillars: open platform, innovative applications, and connected network.
An in-memory platform is at the heart of our solution and of everything we do, being the technology that allows us to build new-generation architecture for enterprise software. Our applications now gain even more from this approach, from a technological AND a business process perspective. For this reason, we introduced simplified solutions last year -- SAP Simple Finance, for example -- and we will keep delivering at a fast pace.
We are talking of these innovations as bundles of solutions to help lines of business drive value in a digital and networked world -- easy to use, easy to implement, and easy to run. Our fundamental motivation is to manage the complexity our customers face, because not managing complexity is not an option.
- Simple decision making results in increased profit margin
- Simple business process is the CEO's key task
- Simple technology tackles IT's biggest challenges
Where did we start?
Everything starts with listening to customers, analyzing the obstacles to change, and co-innovating for better approaches. For simple outcomes, we build on our unique, in-memory columnar database, the only one that handles transaction AND analytics in one. You may have heard about it when it debuted, but it is much more than just a database by now, it is a business platform. Dig deeper here.
Then, we designed with a modern user experience that empowers users to connect with their given roles and carry out their job tasks in one place, not in many different solutions. See more details here.
These solutions will help customers run simple by offering a full choice of consumption options. We will deliver these innovations cloud-first, and thus faster, but not cloud-only.
The customers want choice and they want to innovate at their pace -- not at a vendor's pace. So solutions in this category can be deployed in the public cloud (with full software-as-a-service qualities), in a private managed cloud, or on-premises.
It is clear: Customers want to shift to the cloud at their own pace, and they want to know how to manage this transition cost-efficiently.
We focus on removing business and IT complexity end-to-end, from consumption and user adoption, to business decision-making and execution, connecting everything -- people, devices, and businesses.
How will customers benefit most?
Here are my three favorites:
- The innovation roadmap will enable customers to integrate our cloud solutions at their preferred speed and at reduced costs. Unnecessary process steps are reduced because of the common process model in the cloud option. This will result in a reduced workload.
- Increased throughput of the solutions will enable faster consumption and reaction to growing demand.
- Analysis will be done "on the fly" without any pre-thought aggregates, so any possible question can be answered flexibly.
In the past, it was difficult to implement structural changes to the data setup as a result of aggregates and indices. Our new innovations eliminate these limitations, increasing the flexibility in system setup and usage. And this is just the start.
By removing business and IT complexity end-to-end, SAP S/4HANA enable customers to run simple and reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by reacting to challenges of the networked economy more quickly.
Hear more in a later video blog on how we design these solutions to deliver the value described above.
Our customers now have a huge opportunity to harmonize their often-fragmented system landscapes, since the solutions are running on the platform that enables unprecedented simplification.
It's now time to take a great step forward and implement a new generation of software without disruption. This is a possible thanks to our efforts to vastly simplify both applications and entire IT systems, while maintaining semantic compatibility in the data layer.
To sum it up, here are the highlights for our simplified solutions. These solutions:
- Help customers run simple and drive business value in a digital and networked world
- Deliver cloud-ready solutions for lines of business in industries
- Combine our latest innovations: in-memory platform, user experience, and the global cloud
- Offer choice of consumption: public cloud (SaaS), managed private cloud, on-premises
- Include SAP's existing cloud solutions for lines of business
They represent a non-disruptive breakthrough for enterprise software. They empower the user to take control of company data -- not the other way around. They comply with the wishes of many customers to consume software as a service, which helps them to run simple.
Stay tuned for more updates, especially the next episode when we will talk about how we can help customers to Run Simple in the Digital Economy. Follow us via SAP and myself on LinkedIn and Twitter @SDenecken.
- SAP Managed Tags:
