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“The Digital Economy is here. And if you don’t believe it, it’s already too late for you.” - Steve Lucas, President of SAP Platform Solutions at SAP.

I encountered this statement while I was net surfing to find a topic for my blog and I had keywords such as digital transformation, Internet of Things or Platform-as-a-service running in the back of my head. But the moment I explored this challenging statement, it was surprising to know that SAP is behind the scenes and has introduced a breakthrough platform known as “Digital Enterprise Platform” to assist organizations to become a digital enterprise and reimagine the ways in which businesses will run in future.

Therefore, this blog is a fresh perspective on the SAP Digital Enterprise Platform and the challenges that might hinder the path of platform success.

1. The Digital Enterprise Platform

One picture says all!

(Image Source: SAP)

DEP, A technological buzzword which I have never heard of before is an unmatched powerful platform that consolidates all the existing SAP technological platforms with the cloud solutions and next generation analytics solution to produce the real-time, most accurate and faster outcomes whilst incurring a lower cost. The composition of the platform is as follows:

SAP HANA

(Image Source: SAP)

The core of the platform is the SAP own powerful database i.e. SAP HANA that had been a unique innovation by SAP in 2009 which is based on in-memory technology that scales the expectations of Real-Time data and enterprise computing in one single platform.

HANA VORA

(Image Source: SAP)

A successor HANA which is a hyper-connected framework that allows an organization to fetch the information from the outside world such as Big Data (Hadoop) with the help of in-memory query engine (Apache Spark) and combines it with the data already stored in HANA, allowing significant insights and analytics. These two platform services by SAP have been aligned with the fully established SAP cloud services available in

HCP (HANA cloud platform)

(Image Source: SAP)

An exclusive PaaS solution offering by SAP which is powered by HANA capability that allows the customers to customize or extend the SAP applications to their suited business needs, further complemented by IoT activity integration that empowers information intelligence for the decision making. Also, there is HEC i.e. HANA Enterprise Cloud which is the new IaaS cloud offering from SAP.

Just by integration story doesn’t end here, the capability enabled by HCP to perform analysis on the vast amount of data is captured in a dynamic analytics solution from SAP known as

C4A (Cloud for Analytics)

(Image Source: SAP)

It enables real-time analytics for its users, based on Business Intelligence and predictive analysis in a consolidated user experience (UX). An exciting feature called as Digital boardroom sitting on top of C4A, is an exceptional ability for decision-makers in a boardroom to understand the entire organization’s behavior and execute the strategy at all organizational levels from the application. Whereas, on the other hand, there is the completely new SAP business landscape known as

S/4HANA

(Image Source: SAP)

where S stands for Simple or simplified 4^th generation business suite running on HANA facilitating SAP enterprise system (ERP) on HANA cloud platform and uses SAP Fiori as the interactive and simplified GUI.

Business Networks

(Image Source: SAP)

And of course, the broader landscape of the digital platform is the bringing together of applications such as Ariba, Concur, Fieldglass, SuccessFactors and CEC (Customer engagement in commerce) in a cloud portfolio accessible via HANA Cloud Platform. Thus, the overall picture of DEP is a combination of two things i.e. critical data integration combined with the computation power facilitated in a single consolidated platform that can radically shift an organization to a new digital enterprise.

Though it can be inferred that the platform exhibits profound capabilities which will produce competitive outcomes but the question of successful implementation will always stay in place. Therefore, I have highlighted five basic challenges that a business might consider before adopting to any new offerings.

2. Challenges

Complexity

Businesses don’t adopt services because they are trendy, they adopt them to solve problems. This causes the notion of complexity to prevail. It is challenging to understand that how this giant platform will adopt the architectural complexity of the diverse organizations.

Security

is the most important factor for any company’s technology regardless of using on-premise technology or cloud services and my question is that, will the platform which integrates worldwide data be able to tackle data sovereignty and confidentiality issues.

Pricing

With the current shift of pricing models into pay per usage, per-minute billing and subscription-based pricing models, it will be exciting to see how market-friendly the pricing would be to implement and use this high-yielding platform.

Execution

As we saw that SAP platform displays the substantial integration among its diverse functional products powered by HANA, but it’s success will be in how tightly it holds the hands of organization’s system, specifically nonSAP systems.

Service Levels

Lastly, I believe that it totally depends on the account executive, what they tell to their customers and whether the documentation of Service Level Agreement (SLAs) addresses clear guidelines on offerings, performance, trust and billing like scenarios. Also, what the measuring criteria is and how does SLAs deal with the success or failure of the system.

In conclusion, a track record of 44 years of innovation at SAP envisioned by founders Hasso Plattner, Dietmarr Hopp, Hans Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira and Claus Wellenreuther gives a strong impression that Digital Enterprise Platform could actually become the SAP's next big hit and accomplish Steve's mission of making SAP a market leader in DEP solution provider.

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This is my first blog and I am sincerely grateful to Tony De Thomasis @c821311 for his mentoring and for being an inspiration to the students at #BCO6181 #SAPVU, Victoria University, where I am pursuing Master of Business (Information system and ERPS) – SAP University Alliance program.

Also, Influenced by Paul Hawking, The Su Su Soe, Nash Gajic Timo ELLIOTT, @Steve Lucas

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