For companies, innovation is inspired by the value it provides, not necessarily the technology that is delivered. But fully embracing this concept requires a clear understanding of business transformation needs, its target operating model, and then technological strategies and capabilities drive the choices.

By 2025, 85% of organizations are expected to embrace a cloud-first approach, according to Gartner. And those digital strategies can be executed only with cloud-native architectures and technologies. This means that 51% of IT spend will shift from traditional solutions to the public cloud, which will eventually support more than 95% of new digital workloads.

Cloud technology has become, without question, a strategic enabler for business transformations, competitive advantage, and accelerated growth and innovation. And why not? It provides a shared infrastructure that lowers the total cost of ownership, encourages creativity through agile development, and allows for elastic provisioning and scalability with high performance and real-time data.

But instead of immediately jumping into a cloud implementation, businesses must first set the right overall strategy with expert guidance that addresses outdated and siloed operations, complex data, legacy technology, and change management.

Marching to Cloud-Driven Progress with Guidance

Close collaboration, guidance, and flexibility are necessary when choosing and deploying the right cloud solution and delivering specific business benefits and outcomes. Organizations need to know how to manage a consistent and standard experience with an optimal hybrid of infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service cloud solutions. In addition, decoupled competitive functional enhancements must be designed on a powerful platform, and all those solutions must be integrated and connected to support cross-application business scenarios.

As the flagship offering of a portfolio of premium engagements from SAP, SAP MaxAttention guides our customers through every step of their business transformation journey to the cloud, minimizing efforts, costs, and risks associated with this transition. Our premium engagement solution engineers provide the services, methods, tools, and expertise organizations need to succeed in their digital transformation efforts in the cloud.

Supporting the deployment of cloud solutions from SAP, including with hyperscaler solutions, SAP MaxAttention brings the latest innovations for business process intelligence, hyperconnectivity, and process automation. The key foundation remains SAP S/4HANA extendibility with SAP Business Technology Platform, and enhanced by SAP’s industry cloud and the entire SAP S/4HANA Cloud Suite Foundation. As a result of keeping their core clean, organizations benefit from adopting innovations more rapidly, and becoming more agile and resilient in adjusting their business processes according to dynamic market requirements.

For example, Forrester reported in its total economic impact study that SAP MaxAttention has helped customers increase the ROI of their implementations and landscape management by reducing budget overruns and optimizing value delivered. Participating organizations unanimously agreed that these improvements led to a higher degree of success with their digital transformation initiatives with faster innovation, smoother implementation, lower operational costs, and increased business benefits.

As one customer noted: “The fact that the SAP MaxAttention team is there, they can help engage the right people to work with you. Without SAP MaxAttention, it probably would take 30% or 40% longer to deliver and include a possibility of failure. To be honest with you, the risk level would’ve been a five out of 10. Working with SAP brought that down tremendously.”

Leading Transformation and Innovation with Less Risk

SAP MaxAttention delivers industry-specific content, reference models, expertise, tools, and methodologies that inspire customers to rethink their transformation by leveraging the cloud’s full potential. And as customers overcome their transformation and innovation challenges with a premium engagement experience with SAP MaxAttention, they become smarter, more sustainable, and more resilient.


Kurt Bauer is global senior vice president of Premium Engagements for Cloud Success Services at SAP.