SAP Spend Connect Live returns next month to Las Vegas, and I can’t wait.
Beneath the glow of its famed neon lights, the city is set to play host to the world’s premier spend management conference, where SAP will showcase the increasingly vital role played by AI-enabled cloud solutions in shaping the flow of business-to-business commerce – and in ensuring the transparency needed for trading partners to foster collaboration, gauge sustainability, and bolster resilience throughout global supply chains.
To carry out business processes with confidence and continuity amid uncertain market conditions – from procurement and supply chain to logistics and asset management – organizations rely on an unending stream of data amassed through the routine course of operations. A firm’s growth prospects typically correlate with its access to such data, both its own and that of its trading partners. The higher the quality of that data, the more valuable the insights it contains, particularly when analyzed by emerging AI capabilities. At a time when operational data increasingly determines competitive advantage, businesses have turned to cloud-based networks to harness its potential. Operational data has thus become one of the most precious resources in any organization.
Of course, successful businesses have always set themselves apart by access to scarce resources. But did you know the same holds true for world-class cities as well?
Settled in 1905 as a rail link between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, the sleepy stopover known as Las Vegas was an unlikely candidate to become one of the fastest growing U.S. cities a century hence. Limited in arable land, much of the region lay fallow in the early twentieth century. But with the opening in 1936 of the Hoover Dam only 50 kilometers to the southeast, a city was born and a spectacular growth story begun. The world’s largest public works project of its day, construction of the dam required 21,000 workers to excavate 4.2 million cubic meters of rock, lay 937 kilometers of pipe, and pour 3.5 million cubic meters of concrete – enough to pave a highway stretching from Lisbon to Lapland.
Completed more than two years ahead of schedule in the depths of the Great Depression, the Hoover Dam soars 221 meters over the Colorado River, irrigating 1 million hectares of farmland in California, Arizona, and Nevada. It provides drinking water for urban centers including Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas and produces 4 billion kilowatt-hours of sustainable hydroelectric power annually for millions of homes and businesses across the southwestern U.S.
For nearly nine decades, the Hoover Dam has served as a conduit through which water and electricity flow in abundance, giving rise to a thriving city synonymous with legendary entertainment, a resplendent skyline, and limitless opportunity. For its part, SAP Business Network too is a conduit for exponential growth. But the precious resource it distributes is operational data, and its beneficiaries are the millions of trading partners that conduct business through its enterprise applications augmented by new generative AI capabilities.
Powerful business networks, not unlike mighty hydroelectric dams, represent marvels of engineering, feats of architecture, and transformative solutions to formidable operational challenges. With this in mind, I’m hard pressed to think of a more fitting backdrop to spotlight our latest SAP Business Network innovations than the gleaming city of Las Vegas and the vivid growth story it embodies. Please join us there for SAP Spend Connect Live from October 14 to 16, where we’ll explore how customers are countering disruption, extending visibility, reducing costs, infusing sustainability, and strengthening resilience throughout their interconnected operations and those of their trading partners. We’ll devote extensive discussion to the broadening set of capabilities within SAP Business Network’s trading partner experience, aimed at optimizing value for all of the disparate parties engaged in business-to-business transactions. You can bet on an engaging, enlightening set of sessions led by peers; and I hope to see you there.
Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business Network.
