Budget & Planning Season

?? Hi Everyone!

As the calendar flips to November, we’re officially on the home stretch to the holiday season! It’s that magical time of year filled with cozy sweaters, pumpkin spice, and holiday lights popping up everywhere you look. Even more exciting is the "treat" that comes hand-in-hand with November’s arrival: budget and planning season. While you may not be gathering around the conference room table to belt out holiday tunes ????, there's certainly plenty to tackle when it comes to finalizing next year’s financial forecasts and strategic plans.

If your company is like most, then your backlog of IT requests is probably overflowing ??. These days, more than ever, IT departments are under tremendous pressure to juggle critical tasks while the list of requests keeps growing—making it difficult to prioritize next year’s innovations. ??

If you're fighting an uphill battle ?? with an ever-growing IT backlog, we’re here to help. Check out some of our latest articles to learn some practical ways to dig out from under your backlog and give your IT team room to focus on projects that drive real innovation. ??

Featured Articles

• AI Convergence: Copilots vs. Agents: Microsoft has made some exciting announcements related to Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio lately. In this article, James Wood looks at how some of these new features are ushering in a new era of AI convergence.
• Power Platform Therapy Session: Recovering from Excel, Access, and SharePoint: Shadow IT usually rears its ugly head when the business gets tired of waiting for IT to tackle a growing backlog of requests. In this article, we show you how Power Platform can not only bring those rogue projects under control but also create a foundation to accelerate innovation and help work down that IT backlog more effectively.
• Putting Power Platform Data to Work for Your Business: One of the benefits of migrating shadow IT solutions onto the Power Platform is that businesses now, for maybe the first time ever, have visibility into the goings-on in those dark corners of individual departments. In this article, we show you how to put that data to work for your business in new and exciting ways.
• 7 Ways to Extend the Life of Your Legacy SAP Systems: As the end-of-support deadline for SAP ECC approaches, customers are feeling the pressure to either rush into SAP S/4HANA or face the risks of unsupported systems. But there's a better option. In this article, we introduce a third path that lets you innovate at your own pace—not just maintaining your systems, but evolving them on your terms.

Industry Insights

Last week, we (virtually) attended the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event and there were a TON of exciting announcements. We understand that there's a lot of AI and copilot fatigue out here (we feel it, too), but in the middle of all the sales hype we're seeing some tremendous breakthroughs. As copilot and agent experiences start to converge, we're now able to engage with users in science fiction-y (is that a word?) ways that we never could have dreamed of even 1 year ago.

Right now, we're seeing an AI arms race where enterprise software vendors are pouring R&D investment dollars into their business applications left and right. For perspective on this, check out Figure 2 below.

Our read on the situation is that we're just at the beginning. According to a recent study, the IDC projects that 1 billion new apps will be created between 2025 and 2028. While low-code platforms and cloud agility have lowered the barrier to entry, the real driver behind the demand surge is how clearly businesses now see AI’s potential to transform everything.

This kind of reminds us to the early days of SAP HANA where companies started to grasp the potential but wanted to see HANA fully integrated into their core ERP systems and business processes as opposed to a sidecar database that was used to innovate around the edges.

While the good news is that enterprise software vendors are all in on adding AI to their products, the bad news for some customers is that most of these new innovations are being limited to the cloud and SaaS versions of their products. But if you're on a legacy system, don't worry—that doesn't mean that you’re left out. Using a composable ERP approach like the one shown in Figure 3 below, we can leverage services like Microsoft Power Platform, Azure, and Microsoft Fabric to seamlessly weave AI functionality into your existing systems and business processes and set the foundation for you to innovate at your own comfortable pace.

Upcoming Events

Later this month, we will be hosting a free webinar which explores some practical ways to extend the life of your legacy SAP business systems. Stay tuned to this space to learn more about this exciting event and how to sign up.