SAP Capital Markets and S/4HANA Update

We had the opportunity to attend the SAP Capital Market event, held February 9th 2017 at the New York Stock Exchange. The event is for the analyst community, mainly for the financial colleagues, but with a good representation from the industry side, too Traditionally SAP unveils some product news at the event – as SAP did two years ago with the launch of S/4HANA (my blog of the event is here).

So take a look at my musings on the event here: (if the video doesn’t show up, check here)

No time to watch – here is the 1-2 slide condensation (if the slide doesn’t show up, check here):

Event Report - SAP Capital Markets and S/4HANA Cloud Update 2017 from Holger Mueller

Want to read on? Here you go: Always tough to pick the takeaways – but here are my Top takeaways:

S/4HANA setup for success – now needs execution – When SAP launched S/4 HANA two years ago, there were substantial expectations that S/4 HANA would be widely adopted in its public cloud deployment option. Reality panned out differently, with almost all adoption happening with the on premises version of S/4HANA. We are beyond the reasons of why this happened, for this blog let’s look why this will work now, which we asked the new S/4 HANA leader, Darren Roos. In his view, public cloud adoption is more mature in the enterprise, at the same time enterprises face disruption and know they need to become more agile. Consumerization of IT helps, too – as cloud based products are more easily consumed. But what will really change the fate of the S4/HANA public cloud business is the establishment of a S/4 HANA public cloud salesforce. Focus always helps and sales professionals who have one product, will work hard to earn their commissions – and sell that very one product. On the value proposition side, SAP has stronger arguments – with contextual analytics, a digital assistant, Machine Learning capabilities and a Fiori user experience. Moreover, SAP talked about IoT and blockchain plans, but I somehow missed the briefing on this Certainly even without the latter, enough value proposition to make customers and prospects consider S/4 HANA. And no surprise – both McDermott and Roos share that most S/4HANA cloud customers, are net new customers.

SAP Capital Markets S/4HANA Constellation Research Holger Mueller

Bartiromo and McDemott

SAP unveils SAP Clea, the Machine Learning Sister of HANA and Leonardo – During Bernd Leukert’s presentation he unveiled SAP Clea, SAP’s new offering to bring Machine Learning to enterprise applications, an overdue move. We just came out of the ‘Fall of AI’ in 2016, so it’s key for all enterprise system vendors to make sense of the technology for better usage of enterprise software. Not many more details were shared, this will be a key area to watch, not only for S/4 HANA – but the SAP product portfolio overall.

Leukert announces SAP Clea

SAP talks more PaaS – SAP Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) is now rebranded to SAP Cloud Platform – It seems more and more that SAP has understood the importance of PaaS, the insurance policy for all enterprise software vendors in the era of business best practices innovation and related uncertainty. As enterprises experiment with new digital technologies, seek opportunities for digital disruption, they need to build software in house again. It’s too early to know what the business best practices of the 21st century is, so it is key to have a competitive and agile PaaS product, which SAP Cloud Platform is. A name change is only a name change, but it is interesting for SAP to drop the coveted HANA brand name. On the positive side, SAP, has created enough confusion with branding too many things with HANA – so this maybe a start of reducing the confusion created.

Roos and Pedersen (rtl)

SAP hints to BigData / Hadoop / OpenSource and SWIFT – One of the long-term issue SAP has had is its lack of support for the most important technology of the 21st century so far – the enablement of cheap, massive storage of any electronic information, with almost total ignorance at storage time, how it could be analyzed, in other words Hadoop / HDFS based solutions. And while SAP has added Vora, a Spark based BigData capability, it still remains memory based, but today we know that business relevant data grows faster than memory prices fall, putting all in memory only solutions on a losing path when it comes to deployment decisions of next generation Applications, e.g. in IoT, Machine Learning, etc. So, when Leukert has Hadoop on slides and hints to Hadoop support, it is an encouraging sign that SAP will address this challenge, hopefully soon. More support for OpenSource is always a good strategy, and key partners Apple gets support and a shout out with SWIFT. With Apple CEO Tim Cook calling out SAP (then still HANA) Cloud Platform on the Apple earnings call last week, the ‘love’ between these two players appears to be strong.

MyPOV

A good event for SAP, that looks like having addressed the challenges it faced initially with S/4 HANA for cloud, most prominently a small functional footprint, lack of complete self-service setup, a sales force with the choice of selling easier products to sell etc. SAP has now addressed these issues and added new capabilities with e.g. Machine Learning that create a better value proposition for enterprises to consider S/4 HANA implementations and migrations. But the most important one is the establishment of a dedicated salesforce. Also, good to see SAP working on Machine Learning with SAP Clea, talking more about BigData in general and Open Source in more specifics

On the concern side, talk is cheap and slides are patient. SAP must deliver and execute in 2017 to get S/4 HANA cloud out of a sleeping beauty style deep sleep. Bigdata capabilities, PaaS functionality and Machine Learning are quickly becoming table stakes for enterprises, so speed is of the essence.

We will be watching, stay tuned.

Want to learn more? Checkout the Storify collection below (if it doesn’t show up – check here).

SAP Capital Markets and S/4HANA Update

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