SAPinsider Technology Executive Forum Issue 1 2021

Now, with RISE with SAP, hyperscalers are on board as partners, allowing businesses to take full advantage of their scale, flexibility, and capabilities to conform to local regulations without the hassles of dealing with a broad range of different vendors. “You get the benefits of hyperscalers, but with one partner that is SAP,” says Manherz. “SAP has always had a vested interest in customers’ long-term success which has only grown stronger with RISE with SAP, and helping customers make the transition to the cloud.” SAP’s relationships with hyperscalers represent just a fraction of the partner ecosystem that busi- nesses tap into with RISE with SAP. “The global economy is now a networked economy,” says Manherz. “In fact, McKinsey has estimated t hat by 2025 the integrated network economy could repre- sent $60 trillion in global revenue. And with RISE with SAP companies can make these supplier, logis- tics, and asset networks an intrinsic part of their IT environment’s configuration allowing businesses to achieve true digital transformation by extending it to their trading partners.” For example, a railway company in Switzerland is using SAP’s Asset Intelligent Network to maxi- mize worker productivity to perform maintenance, reduce costs, and ultimately provide a better pas- senger experience. Other customers are performing materials traceability through the SAP Logistics Business Network . And SAP’s Ariba Network h as streamlined and simplified the way businesses collab- orate with suppliers, making it easy to discover and collaborate with them and even take advantage of volume cash discounts via 100% digital interactions. Indeed, this vision of a seamless global business network is going to be one of the biggest game changers caused by the pandemic, says Manherz. “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.” Takeaway: Three themes encapsulate the need to act upon transformation goals this year A year ago, the pandemic put cash-flow front and center but now, as companies recover and reimagine their businesses for a post-pandemic world, three themes emerge consistently. “The first is resiliency—knowing that your infra- structure, software, and business partners can all sustain the unexpected,” says Manherz. The pan- demic taught everyone a lesson. Now that most—if not all—organizations are moving to the cloud, a certain amount of resiliency is built in. But busi- nesses must still be cautious about choosing the products, solutions, and vendors to work with that are best positioned to weather the next storm, no matter what it might be. Next agility: How can you transform into a com- pany capable of identifying risks and reacting to them in time? Change is constant and a key learning of last year is that companies must be agile enough to pivot quickly in times of great uncertainty or dynamic business conditions. Manherz describes this as “having technology stacks that aren’t super sticky—that allow you to change and move around and adapt.” And the third theme is the need to focus on business outcomes. With the latest cloud-native AI and analytics technologies, businesses now have the ability to identify, track, and analyze early key performance indicators (KPIs) to predict what is likely to happen or even prescribe what to do about it in ways they could never do before. Retailers can prevent stockouts. Oil and gas firms can stream- line hydrocarbon logistics. And public sector agen- cies can deliver personal, trusted, and connected constituent experiences—all as a result of digital transformation. Of course, despite these three commonalities, each company is unique in the starting point and the desired business outcome of its own transformation journey. “The real story of RISE with SAP is that we will meet our customers wherever they are, and take them wherever they want to go,” says Manherz. And that’s what RISE with SAP is all about: helping individual organizations along personalized paths that work best to move them from whatever current state they happen to occupy now, to whatever future state they hope to attain. With RISE with SAP, each organization gets the individualized help they need to transform—both today and tomorrow. SAPinsiderOnline.com 7