The following was adapted from a SAPPHIRE presentation. SAPPHIRE is SAP's major global users conference held May 13-17 in Orlando, FL.
SAP recently introduced significant innovations to its portfolio of line-of-business cloud applications. To simplify their technology deployments, best-run companies are shifting from adhoc spending to making strategic investments on one platform that span on-premise, managed and public cloud environments. SAP yesterday announced its vision of a unified cloud strategy to help businesses leverage and extend existing investments to bring cloud and cloud-enabled solutions onto one common SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
To empower line-of-business users, SAP delivers the most comprehensive portfolio of line-of-business cloud applications with more than 29 million users for four focus areas: People, Customer, Money and Supplier. The portfolio includes solutions from SAP companies Ariba and SuccessFactors as well as the SAP Cloud for Customer (formerly SAP Customer OnDemand), SAP Cloud for Financials (formerly SAP Financials OnDemand) and SAP Business ByDesign solutions.
“Cloud solutions from SAP provide us with the speed and access we need to listen to and engage with our customers like never before,” said Grant Fraser, president & CEO of SAP's 2012 Cloud Solutions Partner of the Year, Navigator Business Solutions. “In our past lives, we have represented other ERP solutions on the market, and we chose to focus exclusively on SAP, and especially SAP's cloud offerings, for its superior products, faster implementation and delightful user experience.”
SAP HANA Cloud Platform enables a holistic strategy for integration. Using prepackaged integration flows, customers can leverage best-practice templates to extend their on-premise SAP software investments with line-of-business cloud applications and best-of-breed third-party applications. Customers can benefit from the reduction of implementation time and total cost of ownership, as well as peace of mind knowing that SAP monitors, supports and manages technology upgrades.
SAP HANA Cloud Platform enables a holistic strategy for integration. Using prepackaged integration flows, customers can leverage best-practice templates to extend their on-premise SAP software investments with line-of-business cloud applications and best-of-breed third-party applications. Customers can benefit from the reduction of implementation time and total cost of ownership, as well as peace of mind knowing that SAP monitors, supports and manages technology upgrades.
“We live in an era where slow kills companies fast,” said Lars Dalgaard, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and CEO of SuccessFactors. “We know that the move to the cloud must be a thoughtful evolution that allows customers to leverage their current investments. We are offering a strategy for our customers to help them execute business with the velocity they need by engaging their people, customers and suppliers to execute at scale. We now have the most complete set of offerings in the world to solve business objectives, in virtually every industry, and use case.”
The following is an example of the enhancements made to SAP Business ByDesign:
SAP Business ByDesign: More Functionality for Professional Services, Distribution and Subsidiaries
The solution combines all the benefits of business applications today while helping reduce demands on IT. Key innovations benefit customers by:
- Identifying milestone billings in projects helps service organizations better manage their cash flow and collections process.
- Enabling payment terms and discounting help improve sales contracts for higher competitiveness. Batch management capabilities in logistics extend the selection of products based on expiration dates and shelf lives to maximize product value.
- Adding new country versions for Japan and New Zealand. Enhanced localization kit supports rapid deployment of company-specific localizations that can be used across other companies
