Thank you for joining our first CTO Q&A session this year. I really enjoyed our discussion and your questions and feedback on topics such as RISE with SAP, SAP Business Technology Platform as well as our recent acquisitions. If you missed the session, here’s the replay:
Q&A with SAP CTO Juergen Mueller
As there is never enough time to answer all questions, I would like to follow up with you on a few open topics:
RISE with SAP is a single offering that provides a path to the Intelligent Enterprise for every customer, independent of starting point or complexity. The holistic approach will help companies transform their business. RISE with SAP goes beyond a technical migration to the cloud by providing SAP solutions as well as the cloud infrastructure provisioned by SAP or hyperscaler partners all under one contract. SAP is the one responsible party for the SLA, operations and issue handling. Our partners play a key role in augmenting this offering with other services such as advisory, implementation, infrastructure and application management services. In addition, we continue to work with our SAP Solution Extension (Solex) partners. You can find more info about the role of partners for RISE with SAP on
sappartneredge.com.
Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is a key component of the RISE with SAP package. The
acquisition of Signavio, a leader in the enterprise business process intelligence and process management space, complements SAP’s organic efforts with a cloud-native business process intelligence tool towards an end-to-end business transformation offering. Moving forward, we plan to seamlessly combine Signavio and SAP Solution Manager to enable even more dynamic data exchange between business architecture and solution implementation. SAP Solution Manager continues to remain pivotal for areas like Customer Success and solution-leaning roles as well as Product Management. Currently, there are no plans for Signavio to replace SAP EA Designer.
The
SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and its capabilities in the areas of application development and integration, database and data management, analytics as well as intelligent technologies is another key component of the RISE with SAP offering. SAP BTP is an essential part of our corporate strategy and the foundation for the Intelligent Suite, our industry cloud, as well as extensions developed by our customers or partners. You can find SAP BTP use cases in the
SAP Discovery Center.
- Integration is one of our key priorities and I’m very proud to share SAP’s updated Integration Road Map in the Cloud (see image on the right). In this paper, we show solid customer proof points along our key processes and give an outlook of the innovation and integration scenarios that are yet to come.
- With SAP BTP, customers can derive value from their data no matter where they are on their own transformation journey. For instance, SAP HANA Cloud - the cloud-based data foundation for SAP BTP – integrates data from across the enterprise and offers the power of SAP HANA in the cloud. SAP HANA express edition on premise is still being updated on a periodic basis for SAP HANA 2.0. In addition, the integration and interaction of SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud will play a central role for both products in the future. You can find a detailed roadmap for SAP BW/4HANA and for SAP Data Warehouse Cloud in the SAP Road Map Explorer.
- Beyond data management, database and data warehousing capabilities, SAP BTP entails analytics solutions such as SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC). To buy SAC BI we currently offer two options: For larger deals that require sales assistance, we have a minimum of 25 users. For customers requiring smaller numbers of users, they can buy directly on the SAP Store starting at 5 users or more. Both options provide tiered pricing, so that the more you buy, the less expensive the per user price becomes.
- Another topic that generated a lot of reaction and discussion in the community is the brand sunset of SAP Cloud Platform. Since many of you are asking if there is a rebranding guide around the sunset of SCP, I recommend you to visit the SCP brand transition page, where you will find a list with the rebranded names as well as further information.
- This brand sunset has no impact on the work we do around the free trial and free tier model for SAP BTP services. As I know this is an important topic for many of you, let me quickly summarize the status quo: the SCP trial has been renamed to SAP BTP trial, however, the functionalities will not change; this is a name change only. We also extended the time limit of the trial to 12 months (from a previous three months), to allow for long-term development in one trial account until the free tier model for SAP BTP services becomes available. The free tier model for SAP BTP services will be launched in phases. We plan to have a free tier model available for our customers mid of the year and in the second half of the year the free tier model will be extended and made available to freelancers and businesses of all sizes.
- Intelligent Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT) remain important capabilities of SAP BTP. There is variety of recurring scenarios where AI can be used for processes and SAP applications such as invoices, purchase orders, receipts, payment advice, learning recommendations, and many more. You can find more info on our AI-Factory approach in SAP’s Global Head of AI Fei Yu Xu’s SAP TechEd session. Going forward, it's important to scale AI and ML not just for SAP by e.g. embedding in our systems, but also for the entire partner ecosystem.
- With the acquisiton of AppGyver we expand our no-code capabilities. By adding AppGyver’s solutions to our own no-code capabilities, we facilitate the creation of workflows, forms, robotic process automation and lightweight case management. This will be a complementary addition to SAP’s low-code offering provided by partner Mendix Tech BV, part of the Siemens AG. You can also find more information related to this topic and SAP Build in this blog post.
I want to thank every one of you for engaging in the community and sharing your questions and thoughts. Your honest feedback helps us to get better. I’m already looking forward to our next Community Call in Q2. Stay tuned!