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Highlights of the Sapphire Now 2019 Conference

Written By Abe Olandres
Published • May 21st, 2019
BusinessEvents & Interviews
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During the recent Sapphire Now and ASUG Conference held in Orlando, Florida, SAP announced updates to their technological solutions, as well as collaborative projects with tech-related industries to assist businesses in their path towards digital innovation

The three-day event highlighted new offerings of Qualtrics solutions to enhance experience management (XM), updates for SAP HANA and SAP Cloud Platform to provide easier data accessibility, collaboration of SAP and Apple to expand its app services to iOS and Mac, and collaborations with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and global strategic service partners (GSSPs) to guide users in the cloud through project “Embrace.”

“For Philippine businesses to secure growth and maintain high-quality performance in the digital landscape, they must continuously integrate new solutions into their current systems to ensure that they exceed customer expectations,” said Edler Panlilio, Managing Director, SAP Philippines. “The new data management solutions, product roadmaps, and updates to SAP HANA, as well as other applications that were announced during this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW event, can be utilized by all types of businesses in the Philippines regardless of size, especially that they present next-gen capabilities to support them to achieve their desired outcomes, and make the world run better.”

Here are highlights of announcements made during the 3-day event:

SAP Paves Path towards Intelligent Enterprises with Experience Management

SAPPHIRE NOW also rolled out ten Qualtrics solutions during the event. These tools aimed to emphasize experience management as a crucial factor for business growth and positive breakthroughs.

With these solutions, organizations can enhance the way they interact with consumers by utilizing the experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data) and, embedding them into existing CRM, ERP, and HCM systems, as well as to the SAP C/4HANA suite.

The combination of data and its integration to existing solutions help organizations to gain insights from the values, intention, and emotions of employees, customers, partners, and stakeholders. Business entities can then base strategies around these trends to improve customer and employee relationships, along with the quality of product and brand.

Evolution of SAP HANA and SAP Cloud Platform Provides Quick Data Management Service

Meanwhile, SAP also introduced updates for SAP HANA Cloud Services and SAP Cloud Platform to assist organizations in outgrowing the competition and deliver unique customer experience through fluid data processes.

With new SAP HANA Cloud Services, SAP aims to bring the power and performance of the SAP HANA database to the cloud where it acts as a single gateway to data of any size to address the challenges of distributed data landscapes. The combination of the in-memory technology of SAP HANA with data virtualization results in simplicity for data consumers and flexibility for data management. A data lake storage tier helps businesses to grow their data managed by SAP HANA without limits. On-premise customers of SAP HANA are aimed to gain more benefit from the new cloud services as they can flexibly add capacity as needed.

At the same time, SAP Cloud Platform is evolving further into a business technology platform, helping customers to easily extend and integrate SAP applications with differentiating capabilities. SAP and partners alike enrich the platform by contributing and scaling their business expertise.

Project “Embrace” Guides Organizations to the Cloud

The last day of the conference witnessed SAP announced project “Embrace,” a collaboration program with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud as well as global strategic service partners (GSSPs).

“Embrace” puts the customer’s move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud in the language and context of their primary industry, by recommending the platform, software, services and infrastructure from SAP as well as their preferred hyperscaler and preferred service partner.

The move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud is planned to come in the form of market-approved journeys, reference architectures and easy access to the underpinning technology services required to help customers achieve the best business outcomes. By collaborating with hyperscalers and GSSPs to deliver this program, SAP aims to provide its customers a single blueprint to support their transition and journey toward an intelligent enterprise.

SAP Expands Native App Portfolio to iOS and Mac

SAP and Apple announced that CORE ML, Apple’s on-device machine learning technology, will be available for the first time as part of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. The next version of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK, available later this month, enables businesses to create custom, intelligent iOS apps powered by SAP Leonardo. Machine learning models will automatically download to iPhone and iPad so apps can run offline, and then dynamically update while connected to SAP Cloud Platform.

Through the technological partnership with Apple, SAP has rebuilt its most popular mobile apps for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions, along with SAP Asset Manager, to run natively on iOS. These apps are fully integrated with iPhone and iPad, to maximize security, performance and the latest platform innovations from Apple. SAP today announced it will expand its native iOS experience across its broader applications portfolio, starting with SAP Ariba solutions.

SAP ended the event with solutions to help companies and enterprise customers enter the digital world and become intelligent enterprises.

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Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.