Today, we are witnessing events that have fundamentally changed the face of business: how it is run, what products and services are in demand, and how to keep up with an ever-changing customer experience.
Yet, there are companies that have shown resilience, and even thrived, during the global crisis. How are these businesses succeeding when others are scrambling just to keep the lights on?
Rapidly Adapting to New and Ever-Changing Market Demands
The most successful companies have one mission in common: They respond to changing market conditions with ease and agility while consistently delivering exceptional experiences for all stakeholders. They are intelligent enterprises, and they are moving to the cloud.
How can a company get on the path to becoming an intelligent enterprise? With core SAP applications that hold enormous importance to an organization, the time to embrace migration and modernization is now. By using SAP business applications in the cloud, IT teams can simplify workflows, speed processes, and reduce business risk. Business leaders can adapt to the current situation faster, demonstrating greater agility, higher productivity, and a stronger connection to their customers.
This is where the ability to integrate and extend in the cloud, with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), becomes pivotal in becoming an intelligent enterprise. SAP BTP is instrumental in helping customers turn their data into business value. It is an offering of integrated solutions that accelerate the transformation of data into business value, with database and data management, application development and integration, analytics, and intelligent technologies.
Innovation Leads to Success
Here’s a customer success story from one of our global oil and gas industry customers, Murphy Oil. In a short period of time, the company implemented a digital remote operations center solution on SAP BTP that unified previously disparate information and integrated business processes that sat in different systems. Moreover, Murphy Oil enabled the information and processes to expand all the way to mobile devices. This remote operation center helps ensure that the customer has intelligent data management, smart allocation of resources, improved safety conditions of staff, and a seamless flow of processes.
Innovation is not just about the latest and greatest trends to come out of technology. Innovation is, foremost, about how it impacts the business. For instance, finding paper-based and manual processes that are ready to be digitized is one of the best forms of innovation a company can achieve. This was the case for agricultural company Ruralco, which had several legacy point-of-sale (POS) systems across its network. The company deployed technology built through SAP BTP to provide the absolute highest level of in-store or on-the-road customer experiences — a real win for innovation.
Multiple Use Cases, One Solution
The aforementioned stories are great examples of what SAP BTP can help our customers achieve. What do our customers especially value in the platform that brings them real business impact? We consistently hear two overarching themes that give the platform its edge over the competition: integration and extension.
Integration Suite
SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite is the integration platform for SAP-to-SAP, SAP-to-non-SAP, cloud-to-cloud, and cloud-to-on-premise. SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite not only provides the integration technology for message-based integration, API-based integration, or event-based integration, it also provides pre-built integration content as well. This helps to speed up the integration project times for our customers.
To see this in action, look at how one of our customers, a global cosmetics company, is benefiting from its integrations. This company interfaces with multiple third-party and banking systems using SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite. In addition, it works with a set of implementation partners, and each new point project takes only four to six weeks from ideation to production, highlighting the speed that they are achieving. The customer experienced a 70% quicker time-to-delivery for app development projects, with a 40% cost reduction.
Extension Suite
SAP Cloud Platform Extension Suite provides a cohesive set of services and tools to expand the reach of SAP applications, data, and processes to everyone within the enterprise, and to extend the reach to an ecosystem beyond the enterprise. It provides an ideal foundation for rapid, business-ready application development. With the suite of services and development tools, you can deliver consistent, collaborative experiences across all digital touchpoints and channels.
To see the power of SAP Cloud Platform Extension Suite, check out another customer example: As part of an Australian organization’s evolution to a mature protection and education hub, Taronga Conservation Society worked with SAP to develop a mobile application to unify and simplify the employee experience, improving employee engagement on incidents and notifications. Employees are now getting visibility into incidents and notifications, which was not the case before this project.
Foundation Excellence
While these suites focus on solving dedicated business needs, the underlying foundation of SAP BTP offers a secure, multi-cloud, future-proof underpinning that embraces all major hyperscaler infrastructures (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more) and cloud-based, native technologies.
SAP provides an open business platform, optimized for the SAP landscape, across the major hyperscalers as a managed service with built-in accelerators. These accelerators address developer productivity, connections to SAP and non-SAP systems, and pre-built content that understands the context of SAP applications. Compare this to building from the ground up on a hyperscaler – devoid of acceleration. You can achieve faster time to value with SAP BTP without the worry of looking to a specific hyperscaler to get the job done.
SAP BTP Helps to Run the Intelligent Enterprise
As a pivotal part of SAP BTP, the focus on integration, extension, and the innovative building of business applications with agility, flexibility, and choice helps to accelerate a move to the cloud. The platform is recommended by SAP, optimized for SAP, and managed by SAP, which makes it a very compelling solution for all SAP customers and partners.
Haridas Nair is global head of SAP Platform and Information Management GTM.
