As told by Gianmaria Perancin, Chairman SUGEN CLT, Chairman Utilisateurs SAP Francophones (USF)
When we think at this SUGEN F2F that had to be run, once again in virtual mode, due to all the travel restrictions in place because of the pandemic, we cannot feel a certain frustration in missing the quintessence of our network: to meet in person, so to establish relationships and share knowledge and experience.
We could argue that in return, we do not have to make long overseas travels, we can be more efficient in our everyday work as we do not leave our offices for quite a week in average, that we do not have to unstack a lot of messages waiting in our mailbox, that we can also benefit from being more at home with families.
For sure, these are positive points to be taken into account. Yet, if we want SUGEN to be more and more successful, we need to find ourselves, sooner or later, around the same table, and discuss, eyes in the eyes, about SAP topics that make all our everyday professional life.
While waiting for the "new" normality to be found, our activities are in any case progressing, fostering on the value we could deliver as SUGEN to all the User Groups that are members of our network.
This is for example the foundation of the SUGEN - SAP Executive Exchanges we had with Christian Klein on one side, and Juergen Mueller on the other.
Obviously, Christian focused on #RISEwithSAP very good results: the market appreciates this new offer, that clarify and it simplifies customers' life: there is only one contracting part, SAP, that is also responsible for the SLA.
We know from Christian that SAP will also follow much more the customers by taking deeper into consideration their actual IT landscapes and help the customers in transforming it. This transformation is obviously totally oriented to cloud adoption, in order to be faster in the implementation phase, but cloud means also lower TCO and somehow less maintenance costs at the end.
#RISEwithSAP means also a better thoughtful collaboration between technical IT architects and sales representatives and is presented by SAP as a way to bring customers' digital transformation to a real success.
Furthermore Christian also focused on the recent new appointments to SAP Managing Board : Scott Russell and Julia White have joined the Board, respectively to stress a lot on Customer Success (and Empathy to Customer), and to complete the marketing approach for products, solutions and roadmaps. For Christian, the picture is now complete and is intended to be stable for a long while.
Finally, Christian expressed SAP strong engagements to fully comply with growing sustainability expectations, not only for SAP itself as a company, but as well in providing its customers the right tools to reduce carbon footprints in all business activities.
This major topic was also raised by Juergen Mueller, who has given much more details about SAP's commitment fo sustainability: SAP clearly aims at being "carbon-neutral" for all their operations by 2023.
This goal will be driven through Business Transformation Platform, by a specific platform about sustainability, used by SAP and proposed to the customers.
Obviously, BTP is also Data Management, Integration and Low Code - No Code extensions to the Standard brought by S/4HANA. BTP then is clearly a platform that completes the technology offered by SAP to the customers.
BTP means also an important ecosystem made up of all the partners that are developing tools with SAP.
As to stress the importance of BTP, Juergen wishes to intensify dialogue between SAP and the User Groups, in order to improve the BTP program and sustain it.
After these Executive Exchanges, we had also a quick insight about Next Generation Cloud Delivery, with Tom Janoshalmi and Jeiko Mauersberg: they stressed the importance for SAP to intensify on the strategy "4+1" (AWS, Google, Azure, Alibaba + SAP Converged Cloud operated by SAP Data Facilities in Sankt-Leon-Rot).
This "4+1" approach is intended to simplify SAP and customers' infrastructures in the cloud, by aligning the different current offers around cloud capacity.
For sure, Cloud is no more an option and shipping to the market is underway...
