9 key takeaways from SAP TechEd Las Vegas
CTO Juergen Mueller outlined a series of improvements to the company’s software platform at SAP TechEd Las Vegas, the first of three big customer conferences the company will hold in as many months.
At the heart of many of these improvements is SAP’s Business Technology Platform, previously known as Digital Platform, a collection of data management and cloud technologies.
Together, the improvements provide a picture of how SAP plans to make it easier for businesses to develop applications linking their core SAP systems to one another and with data held on other platforms.
From a harmonized UI, to help with machine learning, the following nine announcements are likely to have the biggest impact on SAP-based enterprises.
SAP is putting the emphasis on its ability to deliver end-to-end support for business processes such as design-to-operate, total workforce management, source-to-pay and lead-to-cash. Some of the tools with which it delivers that support were developed in-house, but others such as Concur, Gigya or Fieldglass were acquired, resulting in a hodgepodge of user interfaces and screen designs.
“For the design-to-operate process, you would experience the UIs of 14 different systems,” Mueller said.
That will change with the launch of SAP Fiori 3, the latest version of the company’s web-based interface design. SAP Fiori 3 will present users with a harmonized design and interaction model as the company rolls it out across its applications. The UI is also available to enterprises developing their own apps on SAP, whether they’re targeting desktop or mobile devices.
On the back end, SAP is also in the process of adopting a single semantic data model across all its applications, with a unified API layer, SAP Graph, that is available to customers in a restricted beta test. The goal of SAP Graph is to simplify development that requires access to SAP data.
“It can be used by any application, running on SAP or non-SAP technology,” Mueller said.
As proof, he introduced Steve Wilson, vice president of product at Citrix, to show how Citrix uses SAP Graph to build micro-applications in Citrix Workspace using data held in an SAP database.
In response to a customer complaint at a recent hackathon about setting up access rights for Success Factors while developing an extension for SAP Cloud Platform, the company has simplified its Extension Factory and Cloud SDK. Now it should be as easy as pairing smartphone with a car using Bluetooth, Mueller said.
SAP is also bringing its data analytics tools closer to its S/4HANA cloud platform, including a free SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) tenant with each S/4HANA Cloud subscription. (Users will still need a full SAC license if they want advanced capabilities such as planning or predictive analytics.) This means that enterprises can create “analytical stories” directly within S/4HANA using Fiori Launchpad, avoiding the need to switch between operational and analytical tools.
The company has also accelerated its adoption of machine learning in its applications.
In June 2018, Mueller said, the company promised to build 60 machine-learning cases into SAP applications within three years, but has progressed far faster than that. “By the end of this year, 2019, we will have more than 200 machine learning cases live,” he said.
Machine learning is now embedded in S/4HANA, C/4HANA (SAP’s customer experience suite), SuccessFactors, Ariba and Concur. “Soon it will be hard to find any SAP solution without machine learning embedded, and these 200 do not even include the ones that come with Qualtrics,” the customer feedback platform SAP acquired last in December 2018, Mueller said.
