SAP Cloud Platform: The High-Speed Rail to the Intelligent Enterprise

According to a recent Accenture’s study, seventy-two percent of surveyed businesses agree that adopting intelligent technologies will be critical to their organization’s ability to differentiate in the market.

For most businesses, however, identifying their path forward to becoming an intelligent enterprise remains a challenge. Business needs are so different that there is no single blueprint for what it takes to leverage these ever-evolving technologies to become an intelligent enterprise that leverages insights to increase productivity, business agility, and competitiveness.

To help companies develop and implement their own blueprint, at SAP, we are enriching our business processes with live, data-driven intelligence to guide choices at each decision point users will encounter. We see these business processes as the trains you ride to carry on your operations and interact across your value chains with higher levels of productivity and automation.

We are also equally committed to helping companies leverage intelligent technologies to devise new business models and innovate in unique ways. Our PaaS, namely SAP Cloud Platform, comes with all the services needed to connect people, things, and business into intelligent applications that extend and integrate with existing business processes. In essence, SAP Cloud Platform provides a personalized high-speed rail to the intelligent enterprise.

Agility to Supercharge Business Transformation

Take the example of Aimiqui, a footwear manufacturer headquartered in Chengdu, China. To thrive in its fiercely competitive industry, Aimiqui had to find ways to capture fashion trends in advance to win customers and avoid massive stocks that did not meet market demand.

Working with SAP, the company has built a new solution on SAP Cloud Platform that lets its customers design personalized shoes, select the desired color, “virtually” test the shoes, and place orders. In this way, the company can collect and analyze customer requirements to design products that truly fit market needs.

By choosing SAP Cloud Platform as a foundation for its business transformation, Aimiqui has been able to easily leverage SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution for intelligent product design, product lifecycle management, and virtual reality technologies in the SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge digital operations center, achieving its intended results much faster.

SAP Cloud Platform provides the ideal foundation to connect existing technology assets and create new ones, making your innovation process agile. You gain instant access to ready-to-use app extensions and integrations for SAP apps, as well as a broad array of ecosystem’s ready solutions that accelerate your innovation process. SAP Cloud Platform is also the foundation for SAP Leonardo, SAP’s System of innovation, that you can use to deliver intelligent business services for everything — from digitizing the extended supply chain with IoT to managing physical and financial supply chains with blockchains and AI-based algorithms.

Additionally, SAP Cloud Platform allows you to extend your innovation reach with API management services to expose and consume services easily from any application, and multicloud support to develop and deploy your solutions everywhere even when companies are using multiple infrastructure providers.

Truth from Live Events and Data to Decide, Automate, and Lead with Confidence

Data is the new currency of business and harnessing its power helps companies fuel new business models to achieve unparalleled levels of efficiency and differentiation. Take the example of GlueMobil.

The company is a leader in mobile gaming across a number of genres, and wanted to analyze mobile game data from its millions of customers to drive further game ideas and feature decisions. With billions of new rows of data filed every day, GlueMobile needed a powerful Big Data solution able to scale and deliver always-on, real-time performance, without the hassle of provisioning and maintenance.

With these requirements at hand, the company chose SAP Cloud Platform Big Data service as the backbone for its mobile analytics because of stability, scalability, and flexibility. GlueMobile can now identify the most popular items that players purchase over time and see how user’s preferences evolve to make decisions at the speed required by its agile development process. Since the installation of the SAP Cloud Platform-based solution, the company has grown about five times in scale and feels very comfortable about its future as a leader in mobile gaming.

SAP Cloud Platform provides a straightforward way to unleash the power of data with a variety of fully managed services — including always-on SAP HANA, Apache Hadoop, and Spark. It allows companies to achieve real-time situation awareness to anticipate business outcomes and act in the moment — with advanced analytics on any data and in-memory performance at petabyte-scale.

Experience to Delight Users with Simplicity

Providing a consistent digital experience across the entire customer journey, independently of underlying data, applications, and organizational silos, is a big priority for business, as is delivering a consumer-grade experience for internal and external users to improve collaboration and productivity.

Sika, a specialty chemical company headquartered in Switzerland, is at the forefront of the quest for a better digital experience as it pursues a rapid business expansion strategy — in 2015 alone, it built nine new factories, acquired five companies, and filed more than 70 patents.

To support its expansion objectives, Sika must rapidly expand business processes and empower new employees and ecosystem partners with the right tools to serve a growing marketplace.

For this reason, the company has become an early adopter of SAP Fiori Cloud and SAP BUILD on the SAP Cloud Platform to take advantage of rapid prototyping and the ability to involve business users in the design process.

Newly created applications and extension can be easily developed on SAP Cloud Platform and then deployed into web apps, mobile phones, and tablets automatically. In this way, employees and ecosystem partners can become productive faster and better contribute to the company’s business expansion. Hear Tarun Bahal of Sika share how SAP Cloud Platform helped his business.

With SAP Cloud Platform companies can take a user-centric approach to building applications by allowing developers and business user to collaborate, expanding their talent pool for innovation and designing solutions that users want to use. They can also take advantage of enticing consumer-grade visual and conversational interactions with pre-packaged services and intelligent bots that are easy to leverage. And to deliver a consistent look and feel across all interaction channels, Fiori enables an end-to-end Fiori experience on any device.

To learn more about SAP Cloud Platform and discover how you it can help you develop and implement your own blueprint to the intelligent enterprise.