SAP kicked off 2014 by announcing its intention to focus on cloud, by pushing back its operating margin goal by two years, in order to gather pace behind its cloud business.
In March, Mobile World Congress saw lots of news coming from SAP. Including a partnership with mobile software developer Xamarin, and SAPs SVP of HANA and EnterpriseCloud, Martin Heisig, explaining how the integration of SAP's existing on-premiseinfrastructure will make a difference to users.
The outlook was once again cloudy in April, with SAP announcing the release of Business Suite as a subscription-based cloud service. This was a significant move from SAP, and seen by some as SAPs move to compete with already established cloud players, such as NetSuite and Salesforce.
In June, SAP announced that SAP Fiori and SAP Screen Personas would be offered to customers as part of their maintenance contracts. It was great news for SAP users, as we had been pushing SAP on this matter for some time. This move showed that SAP is listening to its customers and takes the concerns of user groups seriously.
SAP kept busy throughout the summer months, inking a new partnership with Esri and getting in on the World Cup action. SAP helped eventual winners Germany with its Match Insights technology, analysing big data to spot the teams strengths and weaknesses (that turned out to be very few!).
In September, licensing was a hot topic, with the welcome news that SAP was taking steps to simplify complex pricing and licensing something that has long been a concern for SAP users. Some big news followed in October, with SAPs acquisition of Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion causing a stir. It was the biggest acquisition in SAP's history and saw its number of cloud users increase to 50 million.
Lastly, in November we held the 2014 UK & Ireland SAP User Group Conference in Birmingham. We focused on how organisations can optimise their SAP investments; including cloud, mobile and SAP HANA. It was a great success, with four excellent keynotes from SAP and from User Group Chairman, Philip Adams. There was a lot of interest in the Conference, with diginomica, IT Pro, ComputerWorld UK and Computing all reporting from the event. Were already in the midst of planning 2015s User Group Conference!
Were sure that this year will prove just as busy and eventful for SAP, and we wish all our members a fruitful 2015.
