After leaving SAP three years ago, I became the CEO and Managing Director at Crowe Horwath Australasia Ltd., one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest listed Business and Financial Advisory businesses. During my time at the company, I was faced with a decision to move IT on-premise or onto the cloud – that decision took very little time to make, and deciding to move to the cloud resulted in a significant cost saving for the company. In addition to a significant cost saving the company expects to see improvements in service delivery.
Based on that experience, I have firsthand knowledge and a better understanding of customers’ concerns regarding cloud transformation. I am delighted to bring that knowledge with me as I return to SAP and serve as the Head of Services for SAP Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).
In this role, I am responsible for all Cloud services, Consulting, Custom Development, and Education across APJ. One of my key objectives is to ensure that we are an organization transforming into an outcome-based, cloud-first services business to drive SAP innovation adoption for our customers. Through our services, we are making the cloud transformation faster and simpler – something close to my heart.
Accelerate transition of SAP customers to SAP Cloud
To start with, I want to quote a statement made by Tobias Ortwein, Senior Vice President at PAC, who is an industry analyst that focuses on the global project services market.
(note : Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) is a privately held and management-owned research and consulting firm, which is the most reliable source of European IT market intelligence)
Tobias said in late 2013 that, "SAP Services, and only SAP Services, can accelerate the transition of SAP customers to SAP Cloud. There is an open window of time for SAP Services to lead this, in my opinion, within the next 24 months."
Whether we believe in that timeframe or not, we know that this organization is going to be key to leading the transformation for our customers.
This is also a testament to the credentials of SAP Services. Globally, we have:
- 15,000 consultants worldwide, 70 percent with 12 or more years experience;
- 200,000 customers served
- 15,000 engagements annually
- 500,000 customers and partners resources trained annually
We are working to create offerings that make the journey to the cloud faster and reducing time-to-value and simpler through seamless integration.
Core Cloud Transformation Services
For our services team to be at the cusp of driving transformation for our customers, we are focusing on providing exactly what our customers told us they want.
We know that our customers want to remove the upfront expenses (CAPEX) and reduce operational costs (OPEX) to help accelerate and continue innovation. We also know that our customers want to maintain control as they do with on-premise solutions, but have the agility and cost-savings of the cloud, and someone to be accountable for their SAP environment – and that is what our services organization does for customers as part of a faster, simpler cloud transformation.
Our core cloud transformation services include:
- Advise – 2 to 3 days of services where we review business processes to move onto cloud and determine the type of cloud (public, private, hybrid)
- Prepare – Assessment of the solution, interfaces and technical landscape to be migrated
- Implement –This utilizes our existing A2O (assemble to order) assets with Active Managed Portfolio and RDS to quickly drive rapid deployment.
- Operate – Project infrastructure hosting and Application Management Services (AMS) for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud production
- Expand –Extend the solution to fulfill specific customer requirements on cloud
And, I would like to also discuss a few strategic offerings that are currently supporting our overall Cloud services to help customers maximize success.
Leverage SAP Services’ unique values
In a lot of cases where Cloud is part of an organization’s business transformation journey, we would encourage our Business Transformation Services (BTS) team to approach with a Value Partnership engagement model. This model, essentially, is a network of advisors led by a Business Transformation Principal focused on supporting customers for their business driven IT innovation, enabling their cost and process efficiencies plus managing value delivery in a variety of aspects.
In 2013, we integrated the team from the Cloud Service Center into our Custom Development organization. The colleagues from this team already had several years of experience in extending cloud solutions from SAP. Though this collaboration, we are now able to offer cloud development services in three categories:
- Building brand new customer-specific cloud-based solutions
- Extending and adapting existing SAP Cloud solutions
- Integrating customer’s SAP Cloud solution to their SAP back-end or third party system.
An additional offering, which I am very excited about, is the SAP Learning Hub from SAP Education. It is a complete cloud-based learning experience for our customers and partners that provides full-access to a range of learning assets. It isn’t just content or documentation, but a repository with innovative learning aids, updated presentations, and other educational materials that will increase overall value for our customers and goes towards improving project success and software adoption.
To sum up, our conversations with customers is always about reducing TCO, simplifying their landscape, thus allowing them to refocus on their core business, and helping them to unlock the value of cloud solutions while using best practices.
Indeed, we are more than ready and able, and we are here to drive faster, simpler Cloud Transformation!
