SAPPHIRE NOW - DAY 2
PAC US, Peter Russo - Managing Director
Finally on Tuesday, co-CEO's Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe gave their renewed visions of the market, and how customers can invest for growth through SAP's rapidly broadening portfolio of solutions.
The primary focuses continued to follow SAP's new strategy first introduced at last year's event: "on-premise, on-demand and on-device," however this year, the company was prepared to show the fruits of its developments.
Within on-premise, this continues to center around the extension of SAP's industry solutions, particularly in industries such as retail, financial services and healthcare. For the latter, the company introduced one of its most consumer-oriented applications to date, with e-Care, which is essentially a mobile, subset of SAP CRM functionality, applied to holistic patient care. Under this scenario, the patient controls their own information, allowing access to both payers and providers, in order to improve the level and quality of patient care. In the retail sector, the company also gave a glimpse into its next generation of merchandise assortment planning, leveraging Hana technology, to perceive and correct a retailer's assortment more rapidly. All very powerful technologies, but what is clear is that SAP is emphasizing the business use over the underlying technology!
Within the On-Demand and On-Device portion of SAP's world, what is perhaps most exciting for partners and customer alike, are the opening of the SDK's for both the Sybase Unwired mobile platform, as well as the SAP Business ByDesign. This will allow both customers and partners to begin extending SAP solutions to mobile and to new SaaS solutions in the future. Also tied to this was the unveiling of a new SAP Store, which already houses 40 mobile solutions developed by SAP. While many have pointed to the similarity of the "xApp" concept to the new SAP Store, the former, which failed to gain mass appeal, the ubiquitous use of smart phones and tablets, along with the much stronger Business Objects BI solutions of SAP than before, may help to create a successful new channel and marketplace for SAP applications.
Finally, SAP added a new ambition, which is to offer more "people-centric applications." As mentioned in the new e-Care solution, SAP is now offering solutions that consumer can actively touch and manage, and people-centric solutions go along this line, but are within the enterprise. While SAP's Streamwork collaboration was a first small foray into this space of "social applications," the release of SAP Sales OnDemand, which is based on social interaction in the context of how sales people do there job, will be a major step for SAP in this direction. Additionally, SAP is placing a lot of importance on people-centric applications that are not only social, but also mobile, analytical and integrated to core business processes ... essentially tying together the power of SAP's new portfolio!
About the author:
Peter has over 10 years of experience in the SITS industry. He joined Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) in 2001. He serves as the managing director of PAC's U.S. operations and its partners in Latin America. Peter is also the founder of PAC's global SAP & Oracle Services research teams programs.
On the consulting side, he is involved in U.S. and global projects for software suppliers pertaining to ecosystem assessment, competitive benchmarking, go-to-market strategy in emerging industries, and analysis, planning, and execution of localized partnership strategies.
Peter is often quoted in both IT news and major publications for his views on the application software market. He is also a frequent speaker at IT conferences and PAC Webinars.
