SAPinsider Technology Executive Forum Issue 1 2021

“SAP is stepping into a major market gap with a unified business network because we learned during COVID-19 that if businesses couldn’t immediately engage with their trading partner networks, they wouldn’t even have a basic infrastructure.” —Robin Manherz The challenge is further complicated by the fact that most organizations have also integrated a plethora of proprietary applications into their IT environments. The result of having purchased different types of software products over time creates a complex web of technical debt. The thought of going from this highly complex and customized environment directly to the public cloud and standardized components is exceedingly intimidating to many businesses. “It’s not just a ques- tion of flipping a switch,” says Manherz. RISE with SAP can address these issues and more by moving businesses to private cloud instances where they retain their autonomy. They're running in an environment where upgrades aren’t forced on them, but can be done at their own pace. And RISE with SAP provides them with all the business process integration tools, business process reports, and the business platform services they need to build customizations or integrations on the SAP Business Technology Platform. Their cloud-based apps and integrations will then be much easier for them to maintain over time. This free tooling—which RISE with SAP also helps them use effectively—allows businesses to re-imagine their processes and move at a measured pace from their legacy customized environments to more agile, cloud-based ones. “If there's not an interim step in between those two environments, it's too hard and too daunting,” says Manherz. “We want businesses to choose a speed they’re comfortable with. That way, busi- nesses can be confident and stable in their abilities to sustain new approaches and new business models.” Tapping Into a Global Partner Ecosystem Today’s businesses must operate in a global politi- cal and macroeconomic environment that makes it difficult to operate across borders given the extreme varieties of operating and regulatory requirements in individual markets. As a result, many global enterprises turned to hyperscalers to host their SAP on-premise instances locally, as hyperscalers tend to have sufficient data centers and resources around the world to comply with local regulations as well as scale as needed. SAPinsiderOnline.com 6