Succeeding in today’s cloud environment requires a real shift in mindset. Adopting a cloud-centric strategy entails more than moving systems to a different data center; it requires adjusting to a different frame of mind that embraces speed, agility, a higher degree of standardization, and a consolidated landscape.
This kind of flexible mindset needs to be a part of a larger culture of fast and adaptable innovation across an entire corporation to help move a business toward an intelligent future. As SAP helps customers along their journeys, fast-paced innovation within the cloud – driven by a dynamic, cloud-centric mindset – plays a crucial role.
Embracing the Cloud
One aspect of shifting from an on-premise world to a cloud environment is truly embracing the cloud. Adopting the Intelligent Enterprise in the cloud is no longer a fit-gap approach, which primarily focuses on providing individualized functionality. Rather, it is a much more fit-to-standard culture where the benefits of standardized functionalities can be leveraged with adequate functional coverage, faster implementation, and extensibility.
Customers also benefit from continuous innovation through regular updates managed by SAP and additional offerings through the SAP API Business Hub consuming partner extensions and own developments.
Managing the integration between the different components of the Intelligent Enterprise remains key for customer success.
Offering SAP Cloud ALM to Meet Customer Needs
To support customers’ cloud strategies as well as cloud-centric mindsets, SAP offers SAP Cloud ALM, a cloud-native solution for implementing and managing customers’ intelligent hybrid and multi-cloud suite environments. This solution, part of the comprehensive application lifecycle management (ALM) product portfolio from SAP, was particularly created to meet the needs of cloud customers while also helping customers transition from on premise to the cloud in a private cloud or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) setup.
Customers benefit from an out-of-the-box, native cloud solution that helps them speed up team onboardings for their projects. It is designed to act as the central entry point to operate the SAP cloud landscape with guided implementation and highly automated cloud operations.
A key question customers have is how they can master managing their intelligent enterprise and diverse software landscape in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.
The benefits of an application lifecycle management solution like SAP Cloud ALM not only help customers master their software landscape, but also achieve a fast return-on-investment (ROI) and manage the best use of all their applications. This becomes even more helpful when the provider takes over system operations, but customers still must implement and configure the processes as well as monitor integration, processes, and users.
Customer expectations on managing such an environment with a powerful ALM solution are instant access from anywhere, unlimited scalability, lower IT maintenance cost, and maximum efficiency.
As SAP continues to expand and innovate these capabilities within SAP Cloud ALM, cultivating a cloud-centric mindset is critical for users to thrive in the dynamic and constantly evolving cloud environment.
Rethinking solutions with a cloud-first perspective will be advantageous in identifying and tackling new challenges in the future while creating long-term time and cost efficiencies with the support of SAP Cloud ALM. Businesses ultimately can be better positioned to meet the demands and opportunities of the future and are enabled to better manage their digital transformation.
SAP Cloud ALM also supports intelligent operations with end-to-end transparency on integration, applications, and business processes. This helps both the customer and SAP to fully explore the advantages of a cloud-centric approach and manage the ROI of the customers’ applications in an efficient and effective way.
Over time, SAP plans to cover the entire life cycle of overall intelligent hybrid and multi-cloud suite settings with SAP Cloud ALM.
To keep up with the latest releases and enhancements of SAP Cloud ALM, join the upcoming community calls on new releases and further advancements. And explore the latest updates on SAP Support Portal, where easy-to-consume videos, blogs, and replays of online sessions are available.
Andreas Heckmann is the executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at SAP.
