Five Things SAP Customers Can Give Thanks For
By Sam Sliman, President, Optimal Solutions Integration
With Thanksgiving behind them and a new year ahead, SAP customers are busy evaluating their SAP landscapes -- reviewing performance, charting future business needs, building a strategic plan for enhancements and prioritizing vital SAP projects.
There’s been quite a bit of innovation coming out of SAP during the past year, giving SAP customers much to digest, and there’s much work to be done by SAP customers over the next few months as they map new and/or improved SAP offerings against their business needs.
Here are 5 things SAP customers can be thankful for today as they set their goals and plans for 2012:
1. Extended Maintenance
In a welcomed move -- particularly given today’s turbulent global economy -- SAP has extended maintenance for its Business Suite 7 software from 2016 to 2020, providing SAP customers the stability, visibility and predictability all businesses require to make projections and plans with confidence.
As the pace of innovation quickens, striking a winning balance between present and future benefits delivered by technology solutions has never been more vital to success. The predictable costs that come with extended maintenance bolster the ability of SAP customers to evaluate the new technologies and solutions SAP has brought to market this past year, while maintaining fiscal discipline, CapEx control, and strict alignment of business needs with technology investments.
It is also worth noting that with its maintenance extension, SAP makes it clear that product innovation trumps maintenance fees in the company’s revenue-growth plans -- a unique distinction among tier-one software vendors.
2. Easier Upgrades
One consequence of extended maintenance is the diminished pressure for upgrades. Historically, because of the effort involved, a good number of SAP customers put off large-scale upgrades until the end of maintenance forces their hand. With its recent maintenance extension, SAP gives customers more time to evaluate its new offerings and reinforces its commitment to its innovation-driven over maintenance-driven revenue strategy.
But SAP has done much more than extend the timeframe for upgrades. With its announcement on October 11th to deliver non-disruptive enhancements on a quarterly basis to SAP Business Suite 7 applications and SAP ERP 6.0, SAP in effect signaled the end to the old practice of issuing major releases and heralded the new era of ‘evolutionary innovation.’
In SAP parlance, evolutionary innovation means the non-disruptive delivery of incremental enhancements to the suite of SAP software products from which SAP customers can selectively choose and prioritize implementation in a manner that best suits their unique business needs, operational challenges and growth goals.
3. More Mobility
The combined forces of business need, opportunity and affordability make it all but certain that the pace of enterprise mobility adoption for SAP customers will continue to pick up steam in the months and years ahead. According to IDC, by 2013, more than 1.19 billion workers worldwide will be using mobile technology, accounting for 34.9% of the workforce.
From its Sybase purchase to the present, SAP has made great strides in increasing options for SAP customers to mobilize their business. SAP has built and currently markets approximately 20 enterprise mobility applications – covering areas from field service to retail execution to human resources, supplier relationship management, customer relationship management, as well as numerous industry-specific and line-of-business mobility apps. In its Q3 financial results, SAP forecasts a $548 million pipeline for mobile computing.
More importantly, SAP has empowered its partner ecosystem to take the lead on the mobility front by authorizing select partners to sell mobile solutions from the Sybase portfolio as well as build and market mobile apps using the Sybase Unwired Platform. SAP estimates that 80 percent of future mobile application development in support of SAP solutions will come from partners.
Download Optimal SAP Advisor Report: Why SAP Mobility Now?
4. Enhanced/Extended Analytics & BI
Much has been made of SAP HANA and, moving forward, we can expect to hear much more about this breakthrough technology. But SAP customers are well advised to consider HANA’s compelling, current-state ability in appliance form to generate immediate, sustainable and significant IT savings by improving analytics and BI performance, reducing server sprawl and drawing down the army of data specialists.
Changes in SAP BOBJ BI 4.0 improve upon all facets of the BI promise. In so doing, the business value BOBJ 4.0 delivers is arguably greater, more immediate, and more meaningful than that of competitive offerings as well as prior BOBJ BI versions.
SAP also offers an on-demand version of its BusinessObjects BI solutions, sparing customers who prefer a pay-as-you-go model the cost of buying servers, funding an implementation project, and budgeting for ongoing maintenance and support. SAP currently has more than 200,000 subscribers to its on-demand BI service.
Download Optimal SAP Advisor Report: Why SAP Analytics & BI Now?
5. Superior Business Planning and Consolidation Solution
End of year -- be it calendar or fiscal -- means heightened pressure and tightening deadlines in the planning, budgeting, forecasting and financial consolidation processes vital to all businesses.
Spreadsheet sprawl can be a death knell for growing businesses. As can dependence on disjointed, homegrown legacy systems. Both increase the likelihood of budgeting fiascos and/or extended close cycles, and both signal your business’ need and readiness for the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (SAP BPC) solution.
SAP BPC -- available in versions for both the Microsoft and SAP NetWeaver platforms -- combines planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities with management and legal consolidation functionality in a single application, providing business users with the intuitive, role-based tools, structured processes and centralized data they need to integrate corporate and departmental planning, shorten budget cycle time, close the books faster and ensure compliance with regulatory and financial standards.
All our intelligence points to sustained demand for the SAP BPC solution among legacy SAP customers and the net-new. Look for 2012 to continue this trend.
According to our ‘Got SAP BPC Plans?’ poll currently running on the Optimal SAP Blog, more than 80% of respondents plan to implement or enhance SAP BPC within the next 12 months.
