My key takeaways from 2017 SAPPHIRE NOW

Thursday, June 1, 2017

 

Once again this year, I had the opportunity to attend SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, the largest global business technology event hosted by SAP and ASUG, with over 30,000 attendees.

It was a great event to connect with the SAP community and learn more about SAP product announcements, roadmaps, customer stories and how to get the most out of the SAP landscape. Over three days, hundreds of presentations, panels and keynotes covered the entire SAP ecosystem around the theme of intelligent business transformation. More than 200 sessions were recorded and are now available for replay.

SAP Leonardo and machine learning
The central point of this year’s SAPPHIRE event was how to become a Digital Business with SAP’s packaged digital platform called Leonardo.

Leonardo is a combination of services and tools that embeds machine learning into a new wave of applications. It involves an SAP consultative engagement with the client to help identify requirements and opportunities for smart applications that extend their core enterprise systems. These extended services present themselves as easy to customize via APIs, leaving the underlying code base intact.

Moreover, SAP is leveraging their legacy ERP business and relationships developed over several decades to access enormous amounts of data processed through SAP systems in order to train and refine their data models. In other words, SAP is using the full potential of machine learning!

SAP’s next step is creating vertical industry templates to provide jump starts for building Leonardo AI applications. I do look forward to it!

For a good understanding of the full implication of SAP Leonardo, visit these links:
https://www.sap.com/products/leonardo.html?url_id=banner-us-homepage-row3-leonardo-may17r2
https://news.sap.com/sapphire-now-sap-leonardo-machine-learning-foundation/
http://news.sap.com/sapphire-now-intelligent-enterprise-sap-leonardo-machine-learning/

Cloud first with S/4HANA at the core
While Cloud is the strategic go-to solution because it receives innovations first, SAP offers a lot of flexibility for S/4HANA deployments as well as different transition models to S/4HANA. Another aspect that was largely addressed is how SAP cloud applications and comprehensive cloud portfolios are designed to offer openness, enhanced user experience, advanced analytics, automation, continuous innovation, scalability, speed of data processing, lower costs, etc.

SAP is taking a varied hosting approach—SAP Cloud platform, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud—and is promoting the coexistence of several SAP SaaS services: S/4HANA, Ariba, SuccessFactors, etc.

For more information on the positioning of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and recent developments, check out the following link:
https://blogs.sap.com/2017/05/21/my-sapphirenow-2017-recap-focus-s4hana-cloud/

Conclusion
It was fantastic being there, catching up with customers and partners, seeing how fast SAP is accelerating the pace with recent innovations. It’s also very exciting to anticipate what is coming in the very near future. I’ll be looking forward to the upcoming SAP TechEd event to learn even more about customer experiences with SAP Leonardo and S/4HANA!

What did you think about the SAPPHIRE Show? What are your key findings? Feel free to share your thoughts, findings and impressions.

About the author
Alain Dupont is responsible for Beyond’s Public Sector practice and for the expansion of Beyond Technologies into new lines of business. He is in charge of Beyond’s Federal Government team, the supply of SAP top talent to large enterprises and the SAP Procure-to-Pay business solutions.

Specialized in the implementation of information systems and in the development of SAP markets, Alain has over 18 years of experience in integrated management systems, mainly with SAP. Recognized as trusted advisor throughout the industry, he brings value to his clients by providing valuable guidance, uniting people, business processes and technologies.

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