All customers have their own cloud strategies. For SAP MaxAttention service engineers, individualization is crucial when focusing on the customer’s success plan.
Every company is on the move to the cloud – when the timing is right. This may entail a full migration but will certainly include a partial one.
Large enterprises and corporations aiming to transform complex, heterogeneous IT landscapes that have grown over decades are particularly reliant on support. Often, they begin by standardizing and consolidating their entire infrastructure before they’re ready to embark on their digital transformation journey.
Different Routes to the Cloud
Currently, most of SAP’s biggest customers use the strategic, long-term SAP MaxAttention program comprising of nearly 300 engineered services. Those services cover SAP-centric strategy and road map planning, architecture reviews and design, end-to-end business process integration, and operations across solutions, product expertise, safeguarding of implementations, and much more. It is imperative for SAP to meet these customers wherever their starting point happens to be and to ensure that the groundwork for a successful digital transformation is in place.
Each enterprise chooses its own route. Indian mining company Hindustan Zinc Limited, for example, first had to upgrade its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the latest version before it could go ahead with its plan to move to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
“Deploying SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA and working with experts from SAP MaxAttention can help us become cloud ready and build a sustainable environment using technology and innovation,” said Hindustan Zinc Limited CIO Chetan Trivedi. “With SAP Integrated Delivery Framework and SAP ActiveAttention, we have delivered this program on time and on budget.”
Other customers begin their cloud journey by migrating some processes to a protected cloud operated by a hyperscaler and then retiring their own data center. Kurt Bauer, global head of Premium Engagements at SAP, observed that most customers with an SAP ERP-centric core have added public cloud solutions from SAP and are implementing private cloud on their way to lay out the path for a full public cloud adoption. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) plays a pivotal role for agile core business process extensions. Therefore, it is no surprise that a vast majority of premium engagements used by SAP customers are driving fast cloud adoption and hybrid operations.
Serving Today’s Customer Requirements
The prospect of innovation and greater efficiency is drawing more and more enterprises toward the cloud. Many of the largest SAP customers still run their core ERP business processes on an on-premise platform, often safeguarded by premium engagements.
Premium engagements service engineers frequently deal with some challenging constellations, such as 250 process steps across 40 systems, data growth of 640 GB per month, 800 million orders every year, and multiple enormous warehouses in global logistics operations. Customers with volumes and requirements on this scale think twice about which of their business-critical processes they should move to the cloud and, if so, in private or public.
“In hybrid infrastructures, too, interfaces still need to be robust, efficient, and keep data consistent – cloud technology doesn’t change that,” said Bauer. In other words, for any transformation to succeed, someone must not only take ownership of the transformation itself but must also ensure that the systems – whether they are on premise or in the cloud – function properly, are stable, and deliver the right level of performance.
It’s Not Just about Money
In Bauer’s 28 years at SAP, one thing has remained unchanged for the company: the focus on the customer, which has always been about more than chasing KPIs. “Customers reward companies that listen to them and take their suggestions on board,” ex-Board Member Gerhard Oswald said in an interview for 50 Years, a book published to mark SAP’s anniversary.
Bauer wants to see this SAP tradition live on in the cloud era and for SAP MaxAttention customers to benefit from expertise and best practice-fueled services offered as part of the SAP MaxAttention program they have known and trusted for the last 20 years. This 20th anniversary calls for a proper celebration and experience sharing by best-running SAP customers and SAP top executives, exchanging how to leverage SAP solutions and SAP MaxAttention for years to come.
Therefore, we would like to invite you to the SAP MaxAttention Summit in Munich, Germany, from March 19-21. Take advantage of this opportunity to network and engage in discussions with peer customers, gain knowledge from SAP specialists, and listen to SAP leaders, such as Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE Scott Russell and Thomas Saueressig, as they reveal insights of SAP technologies and innovations jointly with customers’ experiences. Be a part of shaping the future by building a resilient network of intelligent and sustainable enterprises.
Eleonore Gossart is senior marketing manager for Customer Success Services at SAP.