The Future of Business: Engage Young Talent Now and Adopt Cloud Solutions to Spur Innovation

The world of IT is inevitably going to change as digitization and the Internet of Things (IoT) reshape how business will look in the future. And as new generations work their way up the corporate ladder, it is important for enterprise software to perform as well as consumer-grade software does. With more digital-savvy employees in the workforce, enterprise software must provide the same user experience (UX) that Google, Amazon, and Facebook do: It must cater to millennials, a generation younger than the internet and raised on smartphones and social media. This will undoubtedly require greater agility and creativity from the IT department.

To achieve this, IT will likely become more heterogeneous, incorporating both cloud and on-premise solutions in a hybrid cloud scenario. The days of a single, corporate IT department have passed: Today’s digital business requires intuitive user interfaces to engage young talent and the agility of the cloud to keep pace with innovation.

A Fresh User Experience

SAP has already made strides in updating its user experience for the new workforce — take SAP Fiori and the intuitive interfaces that are being developed today, for example. Easy-to-use apps available at any time and from anywhere are quickly becoming the norm to the point where new employees won’t settle for less.

And with SAP looking to advance its cloud footprint, SAP customers can expect more innovation to come. SAP Cloud Platform, for instance, will open new possibilities that were unthinkable before, and SAP partners — not just SAP customers — will have to adapt.

Tackling Tasks with Microservices

In the past, partners would extend SAP solutions with their own applications, complementing the existing functionality and perhaps tailoring it to specific business needs. With SAP Cloud Platform, partners are now taking a microservices approach where instead of creating the typical add-on solutions, they are providing individual, small-scale services focused on addressing a specific task, such as ensuring a business remains compliant with government regulations.

Flexible microservices are a positive step in the evolution of the partner ecosystem, provided these smaller services retain the quality of the larger, partner-developed solutions to which customers are accustomed. SAP customers cannot afford to compromise performance for speed. Microservices also benefit the user experience by providing simpler solutions to specific problems, so customers don’t have to learn yet another user interface in another solution.

Future Innovation

During these exciting times of innovation, it’s more important than ever for SAP customers to collaborate and share lessons learned as they continue their digital journey. DSAG and its diverse group of members are committed to proactively working together to solve issues and overcome any future hurdles that changing technologies and the cloud may present. Input and real-world experiences from DSAG members can help influence the future roadmap of the industry. This sense of community should be extended to the new workforce, and young talent must be taken into the fold and introduced to SAP technology at the start; garnering the interest and enthusiasm of millennials will only help to spur innovation down the road as these employees develop their careers with SAP solutions. After all, they are the future of business.