As businesses move closer to becoming data-driven, SAP partners are helping them capture, harvest, and amplify the power of data. The content built using SAP Business Technology Platform enables them to extend their applications, business processes, and workflows with automation, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, and more.
As data volumes increase, the creation and ingestion of that data also need to accelerate, expanding the variety of information services, automation, and analytics tools available. This has triggered a promising trend in how organizations use and share data. A Forrester Consulting survey, commissioned on behalf of SAP, reported that two-thirds of decision-makers prioritized the integration of data and analytics platforms (65%), establishment and improvement of the use of automation technologies (67%), and engagement with external providers for data and analytics or insights services (64%).
It’s welcome news that companies are starting to generate much-needed value from their business processes – supporting their recovery and growth in the face of a global crisis. But most of them are still somewhere in the middle of this transformation. In fact, Forrester Consulting reported that 48% use a point-solution approach, compared to 18% that have established a pre-integrated platform.
SAP partners are helping our customers worldwide overcome this obstacle with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Whether a customer is just starting to develop a data valuation framework or seeking guidance to further its digital transformation, SAP partners can accelerate the journey through innovative content and services based on years of domain, project, and consulting expertise.
Driving Transformation with Real-Life Intelligence
Just like how data gains value when shared and put to good use, so do the real-world insights and services available from our partner ecosystem. And when using a unified platform of applications and services like SAP BTP, it’s clear the ecosystem of partner best practices, templates, methodologies, road maps, and adoption patterns are critical in helping our customers transform more effectively.
Leveraging this partner content directly allows our customers to resolve challenges faster, uncover new opportunities proactively, mitigate risk early, and construct the system architectures to meet current and future challenges. Organizations can incorporate SAP and third-party data sources with the platform’s applications and services to address critical transformation requirements, including data management, robotic process automation (RPA), APIs, chatbots, cloud migration, process intelligence, governance, and collaboration. To help customers realize these benefits more rapidly, SAP partners can speed innovation and adoption of their content by customizing and contextualizing it through engagement models such as hackathons, coaching, and go-to-market guidance.
Accessing the Right Insights Anytime, Anywhere
In today’s high-tech world, it is easy to get caught up in the complexities of data extraction, transformation and enrichment, and the expertise needed to model data, machine learning algorithms, and analytics. SAP BTP offers capabilities that can package integration flows, pipelines, graphs, data models, and industry templates alike in the form of business content – tremendously simplifying these complexities regardless of the myriad of cloud, on-premise, or hybrid landscapes.
For example, marketing organizations are known for receiving large volumes of data generated by various sources at an ever-accelerating pace. Like many lines of business, as they try to aggregate and consume this data, they face the risk of using distorted insights that can negatively influence decision-making and impact their ability to uncover new opportunities.
Our partners help customers overcome this common challenge by harmonizing and integrating all data with ready-made connectors, delivering clean, consistent, and available information through a single location. Once stored in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud as part of SAP BTP, the data can then be analyzed and visualized quickly, accurately, and meaningfully in SAP Analytics Cloud.
This content-driven approach to marketing data integration automatically extracts, transforms, and loads data from company and commerce Web sites, social media, ad platforms, affiliated networks, Web and TV audience tracking systems, offline files, and other sources. Its underlying technology scales enterprise-wide to fulfill future data processing and analytics needs and automates data operations in ways that save time and resources while focusing on delivering strategic outcomes. Best of all, marketers have the visibility they need to weigh their campaign investments by measuring their contribution to overall business success.
Infusing Trust with External Data to Safeguard Operations
The finance function is another area that can benefit from augmenting data management capabilities with SAP BTP content and services. In one use case, SAP partner content and services help the line of business meet regulatory obligations with trusted external information – protecting the customer’s operations from the inadvertent laundering of proceeds from financial crimes or association with corrupt business practices.
For example, when used within SAP Data Warehouse, the World-Check Risk Intelligence database connects financial and market data management and analytics with the most stringent research guidelines. The database is supported by hundreds of specialist researchers and analysts across the globe who collate information from reliable and reputable sources, such as watch lists, government records, and media searches.
Building a Data-Informed Business Culture
One of the most significant advantages of data management and analytics-related content and services is time savings. As the right people get the information they need faster, it takes less time to make the right decisions to capitalize on emerging opportunities and mitigate potentially damaging risks.
Our partners can deliver on that promise with business content from SAP Analytics Cloud, which is available as part of SAP BTP. They have created packages to jump-start the implementation and use of the advanced analytics solution, leveraging their real-world experience with customers.
Their experience and the resulting solution implementations leverage front-office content such as visualizations, key performance indicators, analytics, and digital boardrooms, as well as hidden back-office process modelling and logic. These combined sets of tools are often embedded within line-of-business workflows, mapping directly to SAP solutions. And it’s the combination that delivers the time savings and business value customers need – aligning to meet the requirements of specific departments, industries, and, in some cases, both.
Sharing and Thriving with a Collaborative Ecosystem
When considering the factors that account for business growth, the power of shared experiences, industry expertise, innovation, and lessons learned are some of the most important drivers. And that is why our partners’ collective content for SAP BTP is so impactful in our customers’ transformation journey to becoming data-driven and intelligent enterprises.
The pool of SAP BTP partner content, services, and intellect can offer a significant competitive advantage to customers that want to extend and amplify their applications, business processes, and workflows with the power of data and automation. It can create new possibilities to operate more effectively and efficiently through analytics, workflow triggers, artificial intelligence, and the development of new, data-driven intelligent applications. It can give organizations the peace of mind of knowing that even the most ambitious initiatives are achievable and the biggest hurdles are attainable.
To learn more about how SAP partners are helping businesses succeed with a unified technology platform, explore my other articles. If you are an SAP customer, you may want to check out SAP Store or SAP Discovery Center for use cases that fit your business goals. If you’re interested in software partnership opportunities with SAP, check out SAP PartnerEdge, Build. And if you’re already a partner, check out these exciting initiatives: Hack2Build and SAP Co-Innovation Lab.
Jagdish Sahasrabudhe is CTO of Global Partner Organization at SAP.