What does a DJ have to do with an online business? It turns out, quite a lot.
For starters, both sell experience. A DJ sell an experience of dancing to great catchy mixes, while a business sells a seamless and hopefully delightful customer experience. Both face a challenge of having to use a variety of tools.
A DJ mixes music genres and styles, which may be recorded in different parts of the world at different times, adds various music instruments, sound effects, and beats. Each mix is unique and is meant for specific audiences. Businesses often use a variety of channels, markets, and software solutions, attempting to create a risk-free, highly customizable, individual, flexible, and unimpeded customer experience.
Obviously, for a DJ it would be unthinkable to physically bring together all the artists required for a mix into one studio. Not only is it hardly manageable, it can also be quite pricey. This is why a DJ uses something called a mixer, a piece of hardware or software that brings together, orchestrates, and offers a unified view of all the pieces of music in the mix.
Now there is software that does the same for the business: SAP C/4HANA Foundation.
Any business faces the challenge of implementing new business models. Such a challenge needs to be supported by a software solution. These solutions must be scalable, risk free, fast, and cost efficient. Implementation, however, often fails to hit all these targets. Very often, they are quick patches designed to take the edge off a problem, such as implementing a new technology. Both developers and system administrators struggle with the task of integrating new technology into the variety they already use and are unable to deal with the core issue.
SAP C/4HANA aims to do just that: resolve the core issue. SAP C/4HANA Foundation is a lightweight yet powerful technology layer that infuses SAP C/4HANA with agility, openness, and extensibility and enables effortless design and delivery of amazing customer experiences. All this entails no extra charges for customers entitled to use SAP C/4HANA Foundation.
With SAP C/4HANA Foundation, you can rapidly implement new business models, provide an engaging customer experience, and keep operational costs low.
SAP C/4HANA Foundation is an orchestration layer designed to create a unique customer experience that enables customers to manage the complexity centrally while allowing them to customize and grow their business. SAP is uniquely positioned to offer a solution that encompasses the end-to-end customer experience and the ability to harmonize across the suite.
Currently, SAP C/4HANA Foundation includes SAP C/4HANA cockpit, a place where customers can keep track of all their entitlements, the list of provisioned clouds including their status, and further administrative links. With it comes unified access across the entire SAP C/4HANA suite, one identity to all platform components for all SAP C/4HANA suite customers.
Based on open-source project “Kyma,” SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory harmonizes the integration and customization across SAP C/4HANA and provides smooth integration. It also improves product stability and upgradeability by externalizing customizations and extensions, and increases agility through open standards, technology-agnostic solutions, event-based cost-efficient extension mechanism, and reusable services.
Being the frontrunner of technology is genuinely exciting and it also offers a great opportunity. With SAP C/4HANA Foundation, we are setting standards for the entire industry and strive to take customer experience to a whole new level.
Thomas Hertz is head of Technology for SAP C/4HANA.
