When transitioning to the cloud, businesses want their data, processes, and applications to have the same integrity as their on-premise counterparts. For many SAP customers, such consistency is found in an intermediate hybrid stage, delivered through SAP Preferred Success.
According to IDC, more than 90% of enterprises worldwide will rely on a mix of on-premise and public cloud environments to meet their IT infrastructure needs within the next two years. And this trend is gaining momentum for a good reason – an incremental transition to the cloud helps ensure the operational continuity necessary to handle today’s challenges.
However, for most companies, moving 100% to the cloud is the realization of a multi-year road map, not a single digital transformation effort. Each step along a carefully orchestrated journey requires a secure migration of the IT landscape and data, seamless integration and expansion of line-of-business processes, greenfield innovation, and continuous intelligence exchange. But in the meantime, integration architecture, data management, enterprise processes, and user experience must remain stable enough to fend off disruption, risk, and noncompliance.
SAP customers are mapping and navigating their unique path to the cloud by adopting the cloud platform, with the assistance of the SAP Preferred Success offering. Guided by insight-driven, prescriptive, and personalized expertise, they benefit from a customer success approach that is ideal for their IT operating model today and brings them closer to becoming a fully cloud-based operation in the future.
Amplifying the Dynamic Opportunity of Hybrid and Full Cloud Environments
From sales, marketing, and the supply chain to finance and human resources, organizations worldwide are challenged with unlocking the value of diverse system environments comprising SAP and third-party solutions. This pressure comes from employees and customers with unique needs and an executive team facing a rapidly evolving market. Meanwhile, constraints such as data silos and disconnected technologies make any effort to respond to change with agility, efficiency, and sustainability even more difficult to achieve.
SAP Preferred Success helps our customers sort through such complexity by offering a broad portfolio of best practices for securing the IT landscape and fostering DevOps readiness. From design discovery to a smooth go-live, the offering helps ensure our customers access standard integration packages combined with solution capability advisory for SAP and third-party interfaces. Side-by-side extension applications, greenfield innovations such as mobile apps, and other user interfaces are also supported through solution capability advisory and a safe-start readiness approach.
In these COVID-19 times, companies are also looking for new business models to survive. SAP Preferred Success provides advisory services for SAP Conversational AI to allow our customers to deliver differentiating digital experiences through chatbots and intelligent robotics process automation (RPA). In return, our customers stay on the cutting edge of technology with faster adoption of the latest innovations through tailored release planning and new feature implementation.
Such support from SAP Preferred Success opens the door to a faster, more flexible transition from a hybrid landscape to one that is entirely cloud based. This approach can increase project efficiency, process speed, transparency, communication effectiveness, user adoption, and collaboration across organizations and third parties. More importantly, our customers can achieve these competitive advantages while realizing seamless integration, minimal overhead, high development potential, and a user experience that connects the entire workforce and business network.
For example, many midsize businesses and large enterprises rely on cloud platform capabilities and best practices for increasing the productivity of hundreds of developers and administrators across multiple innovation hubs. Tapping a broad portfolio of advisory and design discovery services, our customers pursue a long-term, stable, and fit-to-standard integration architecture for many interfaces and establish global reach for their processes. Change management, platform capability evaluation, strategic innovation road map planning, and advanced support and advocacies are also constant sources of value realization.
More notably, our customers rely on SAP Preferred Success to continue navigating their path to an ultimate cloud vision. We help them undergo new implementations, migrations, enhance the cloud platform with the latest innovations, and extend standard functionality to evolve operations.
Driving Intuitive, Coordinated Momentum to the Cloud
The core of every path to cloud-driven operations is an intermediate hybrid cloud strategy that establishes a foundation of intelligence with integrity, continuity, and security. Designed to deliver such an edge, when combined with SAP Preferred Success, the cloud platform can empower organizations to overcome challenges of all complexities by integrating processes, supporting innovation through solution extensions, and harnessing the power of the entire software ecosystem.
For more real-life insights on SAP Preferred Success, read the rest of our blog series, “Heading to the Cloud with SAP Preferred Success.” You’ll discover how your entire company can accelerate cloud adoption and business outcomes with insight-driven, prescriptive, and personalized guidance and support.
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Amit Lodhe is global director of SAP Preferred Success, Platform and Technology at SAP.