SAP Strategy and Products for the Future

The digitization of the workforce and advent of Cloud technologies has caused an enormous shift in the enterprise technology market. The market needs today is enterprise-class adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, next-generation analytics, and much better integrated business applications. Market leaders like SAP and Oracle invested heavily to move from on-premise to the cloud.

SAP adopted a strategy of combining key acquisitions and building innovative solutions that meet the market demand. They acquired leading cloud-based solutions like Ariba, Concur, and Success factors. Starting with HANA they have delivered S/4 HANA and a suite of BI solutions to the market that meets various business needs.

The purpose of SAP HANA was to simplify SAP solutions and deliver a more agile and productive solution. It was a solution to the business need for real-time processing of transactions and analytics for all of a company’s data. The advent of modern microchip technology resulted in explosive processing speeds and brought in-memory processing of data mainstream. SAP HANA is a relational database management system that combines OLAP and OLTP processing into a single in-memory database. It eliminates the use of aggregated data and indexes which experts found caused 60% to 90% of application complexity. SAP HANA provides the foundation over which new generation of applications and solutions are built. It delivers an enterprise system that is fundamentally simpler, with high productivity, agility and performance.

S/4HANA, the Next generation Intelligent ERP for Digital World .Designed based on three words Immediate, Intelligent, and Integrated. S/4HANA is a suite of solutions that runs on top of HANA. It can be run on SAP’s managed private cloud platform or in the public cloud with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, or a customer’s own on-premise data centre. In 2015 SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott as “our biggest launch in 23 years, if not in the entire history of the company”. S/4HANA delivers all core ERP capabilities in one place, with one underlying data store. Currently the major modules being implemented are Simple Finance and Simple Logistics. SAP claims adoption by more than 6000 clients globally.

SAP has a great suite of Business Intelligence products that are available as on premise or in the cloud solutions. These products give actionable information that leads to effective business decisions. SAP continues with its time-tested Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports products while improving on its Data Visualisation and Analysis tools. Xcelsius has been taken out of the roadmap and Lumira 2.0 combines Lumira and design studio for data visualization needs. SAP RoamBi caters to the mobile-centric analytics and data visualisation needs. The latest offering SAP Analytics Cloud aims to offer access to all data so that business users can easily discover, visualize, plan and predict. This solution is fully cloud based. The buffet of BI tools available enables a potential client to choose an offering that meets their exact business need.

SAP is having very good success in the market with their new products. In their fourth quarter financial statement in SAP has raised its targets for 2020, predicting that “strong momentum” in cloud services would pave the way for more predictable and higher revenue streams.

With the growing demand of SAP HANA market, In order to keep up with the change, the people in the SAP industry will have to upgrade their skills. Comprehending the need for this transition Ripples Info Under the expert guidance with a vision to produce Subject matter experts for the industry demand with a simplified learning process.