SAP will unwire and evolve

MUMBAI, INDIA: Marking their 100th day as co-CEOs of SAP AG this week, Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe addressed an on-site and online audience of 50,000 customers, partners and employees at SAPPHIRE NOW, being held simultaneously in Frankfurt, Germany, and Orlando, Florida, May 17-19, 2010. In their keynote speeches, the co-CEOs acknowledged that a convergence of market forces — including globalization, industry consolidation, mobility and an explosion of data — are changing how business is run.

Successful business leaders are viewing this convergence as a defining moment, one that compels enterprises to run better in real time, with unwired and sustainable operations. To help customers achieve these goals, McDermott and Snabe today outlined a product strategy that extends the availability of SAP product offerings on premise, on demand and on device — all orchestrated as networked solutions on the market’s most scalable, feature-rich  and stable core platform.

Speaking live from Orlando and broadcast simultaneously in Frankfurt, McDermott acknowledged the unstoppable forces reshaping business today, and how companies will need to respond to grow their business, empower their people, inspire their customers and transform their business networks. Demonstrating that connectivity is creating data at an explosive rate, McDermott encouraged business leaders to take “the opportunity of the century” to create new insights out of this explosion of data. He also acknowledged that much of today’s needs for insight exceed yesterday’s technology, and that the time for change has come.

Today’s leading companies require a “virtual boardroom” that enables workers at all levels of the organization — from the shop floor to the boardroom — to make better decisions in real time to grow the business. “SAP’s commitment to in-memory computing and technologies that enable real-time transparencies is helping companies gain the insight they need to make decisions that are best for the business,” said McDermott.

McDermott went on to say that enterprise workers today expect their business applications to be mobile and closer to the point of action. “When you mobilize people, they can do amazing work. It unlocks the value of your platform across the entire enterprise and allows people to literally make decisions in flight. Workers are no longer tethered to the desktop.

In fact, mobility is the new desktop,” proclaimed McDermott. Citing mobility as an unstoppable force, McDermott announced that SAP is taking bold steps to unwire its customers. He referenced the recent news of SAP’s intent to acquire Sybase as an example of the company’s commitment to mobile technologies. The combined company will be the only provider of a full suite of enterprise software and next-generation business intelligence on any device at any place at any time, McDermott stated.

Jim Snabe also noted the shift in the ways businesses are connecting. “It is not just about optimizing your own processes for your own customers; it is about optimizing the entire value chain until the end consumer.” As companies build ever more connections and processes across their business networks, they can also share infrastructure in cloud computing environments. However, they still want to own the on-premise infrastructure and unique processes and capabilities that enable them to differentiate themselves from the competition. A second shift the co-CEO sees is the speed at which “people are connecting in new ways using digital environments,” where an uncontrollable information flow cannot be managed by a predictable process, and where “people decide what’s next.”

And thirdly, in a world in which the amount of data doubles every 18 months, Snabe underlined that “We need to make faster decisions, and empower people throughout the organization, and not just the top – it requires complete new architectures to make it happen.”

Snabe underlined SAP’s unique commitment to ensuring consistency across all on-premise, on-demand and on-device applications, designing and orchestrating them to fit together as “networked solutions.” He reiterated the company’s commitment to extending its leadership in on-premise solutions and to continuing innovation in its flagship SAP Business Suite and the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, enabling customers to adopt new features at their own pace.

Snabe stated that SAP is committed to entering the on-demand market in a strong way, taking two approaches “with the clear intent to become the leader.” The first approach is line-of-business extensions for smaller-step processes such as sales force automation, expense management or talent management. He said SAP will differentiate itself with on-demand solutions that “integrate with the on-premise world in a seamless way, so that a lead doesn’t continue to be a lead; it becomes an order, a delivery, an invoice and a payment — most of which happens in the on-premise world.” The second is an “integrated on-demand suite approach, where companies have a collection of best practices to run their business end-to-end,” and do not have to install and configure hardware or software.

Snabe also illustrated SAP’s aims to become the undisputed leader in mobile business applications, reaffirming that SAP will deliver on-device applications for its established products and for new products such as the SAP StreamWork application to support person-to-person collaboration, business processes and analytics across all leading mobile platforms — allowing customers to have their choice. SAP will also provide a gateway for partners and customers to create complementary applications.