Bringing a Digital Experience to the Customer

Airbnb. Uber. Square. When you think of “digital,” these are the types of businesses that come to mind: highly disruptive companies that are transforming entire industries. But you should also think of how the customer expectations created by these kinds of organizations are cascading beyond their original contexts.¹

Quite simply, customers now demand digital experiences, regardless of the provider. Businesses must now align their offerings, people, processes, and business models to deliver these experiences and meet the expectations of customers. This is what’s driving transformation in every company — including SAP.

To better serve its customers, SAP must also embrace digital transformation. Many people know SAP Digital as the team behind SAP Store.² But our real impact lies in how we help SAP and partner product teams deliver holistic digital experiences. SAP Digital has helped digitize two offerings in particular — SAP HANA Cloud Platform and focused solutions for SAP Solution Manager — that are helping to change the way customers consume SAP software.

Digitizing SAP HANA Cloud Platform

SAP HANA Cloud Platform has already helped many companies develop new applications or extend existing ones. SAP Digital worked with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform team to create digital experiences for several of their offerings:

• User-based packages for SAP HANA Cloud Platform: These packages enable companies to quickly develop business applications in the cloud³
• SAP HANA Cloud Platform, starter edition: With the functionality of SAP HANA AppServices and the SAP HANA platform, customers can immediately begin developing applications as a service at a minimal upfront cost⁴
• SAP Web IDE: With zero installation required, customers can build SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 apps in a fully fledged development environment that offers mobility, integration, and other services⁵

These offerings are available on SAP Store, where they’re easily discovered and purchased through an intuitive buy-and-deploy model that’s practically invisible to the end user (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 — SAP Store provides an easy buying experience

SAP Digital helped the product team enable some essential, digitally native attributes in their offerings. This included automating the provisioning process to gain significant improvements, including:

• Deployment time reduced by 90%
• Dynamic user management and upgrade scenarios, such as upgrading from free to paid editions or from one paid, user-based package to another so developers can start small and scale at will
• Seamless digital click-through contracts, where the customer can review and accept the contract electronically during the online purchase process

Digitizing Focused Solutions for SAP Solution Manager

Another opportunity for digital transformation inside SAP was with SAP Solution Manager. SAP Solution Manager is a stable and widely used platform for managing SAP software landscapes. To spare customers from the time-consuming development needed to customize the offering, the SAP Solution Manager team built two ready-to-run extensions. The first is Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager,⁶ (see Figure 2), which is used for managing business requirements and software development in agile innovation implementation projects. The second is Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager⁷ (see Figure 3), which enables customers to create compelling dashboards to monitor operations, governance, application performance, and program readiness metrics for their SAP solutions.

Figure 2 — Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager enables the creation of compelling dashboards for managing business requirements

Figure 3 — Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager enables the creation of compelling dashboards for operations monitoring

To create digital experiences for these solutions, the SAP Digital and SAP Solution Manager teams collaborated closely to enable a simple, intuitive purchase and consumption experience for customers via SAP Store. This includes offering these solutions with a very affordable subscription pricing (€250 per user, per year), even for on-premise deployments, and supporting purchase capability in 230 countries and territories. The teams also worked on enabling dynamic user management to adapt to customer needs, clearly highlighting relevant prerequisites during product discovery, and facilitating partners to purchase on behalf of their customers. And by developing functionality to inform customers about both focused solutions as cross-recommendations in a true business-to-consumer manner, companies can purchase and adopt these solutions just like they would for consumer products on a retail site.

Deeply Digital

While the headlines may still focus on the well-known consumer companies that are prominent in digital disruption, make no mistake: The fact that the SAP HANA Cloud Platform offerings and the focused solutions for SAP Solution Manager are now available through a simple “want now, buy now, use now” model on the SAP Digital commerce infrastructure is deeply transformative. You can explore these offerings and other digital experiences yourself at SAPstore.com.

^{1 For more on this topic, read “How Digitally Native Solutions Will Change Daily Work” from the April-June 2016 issue of SAPinsider. [back]}

^{2 SAP Store can be accessed at www.sapstore.com. [back]}

^{3 More information about user-based packages for SAP HANA Cloud Platform can be found at www.sapstore.com/HCP. [back]}

^{4 Details on SAP HANA Cloud Platform, starter edition can be accessed at www.sapstore.com/hcpstarter. [back]}

^{5 Visit www.sapstore.com/WebIDE to learn more about SAP Web IDE. [back]}

^{6 Learn more about Focused Build for SAP Solution Manager at https://www.sapstore.com/FocusedBuild. [back]}

^{7 For more on Focused Insights for SAP Solution Manager, visit https://www.sapstore.com/FocusedInsights. [back]}