Last month, SAP users came together from across the globe to attend SAP’s annual Sapphire NOW 2018 Conference in Florida. Continuing the trend of recent years, the conference centred around SAP’s commitment to digital transformation. The keynote from SAP CEO Bill McDermott described ‘the next move’ for SAP, as the company expresses a desire to become the leader for CRM with its C/4HANA suite. SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner followed by focusing on the “intelligent enterprise”, highlighting new products and partnerships designed to make organisations more intelligent.
But what does this mean for users? Firstly, it means a number of new SAP products and partnerships, which are designed to assist customers in adopting emerging tech. This includes SAP Conversational AI, SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain and the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation, which gives customers the opportunity to develop their own machine learning applications.
A number of journalists attended the event and gave their independent take on the news. Computer Weekly focused on the main points of Bill McDermott’s keynote, paying close attention to the company’s goal to take over the CRM market. diginomica also reported on McDermott’s keynote, highlighting SAP’s plans to better connect its back end and customer-facing systems. However, the publication also expressed concern on whether SAP can follow through on their promises of better data management. The Register covered SAP’s plans to release a private cloud deployment with IBM Cloud, as well as the company’s apparent focus on integrating emerging technology – particularly on its new blockchain service offering.
Sapphire NOW always provides a great insight into SAP’s product strategy and this year was no different. As more information becomes available in the coming months we will work closely with SAP to help you understand what these latest innovations will mean to your organisation. You can keep up to date here.
