SAP is pumping out announcements at its Sapphire conference but its unified cloud strategy and SAP Fiori productivity applications are of particular note.
Under the unified cloud strategy, SAP will support all of its cloud products on its in-memory HANA database technology within the next one to two years. It has already moved its core on premise applications, including Business Suite, to HANA and made HANA available on the cloud (see SAP boldly takes HANA to the cloud). Native SaaS assets such as Ariba and Successfactors are already using HANA for analytics. If there were any doubts about the level of commitment to HANA and the cloud this dispels them – the future of the company has been committed to them. Plans for the wholesale availability of complex line of business applications in the cloud is another sign that the cloud and SaaS is poised to shift into new development phase, taking on mainstream business applications, at scale, and appropriate for large enterprises. See further thoughts on this theme in our Make or Break predictions here.
The other announcement that grabbed our attention was SAP Fiori – a set of productivity applications with consumer-style UI’s - think Apple, Google - designed to work across multiple devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones). The initial set of 25 applications will focus on the most common business processes e.g. approvals, sales order and invoices creation. They aim to address one of SAP’s long-standing problems – usability – but will also extend its applications to a wider audience, particularly casual users. More users means more revenue and so it is another strategy for counteracting the expected decline in licence revenue from its traditional applications – and a statement that SAP is doing all it can to remain relevant. This announcement also hooks into another of SAP’s news pieces, its Mobile Secure service, which is designed to secure Android and iOS devices for enterprise use.
These announcements underline the rapid pace of development in disruptive technology areas – now all that is needed is for enterprises to start spending serious money in these spaces.