Farewell, 2020! Thank you for the bright spots.

Letting go of 2020 is probably easy for most of us. There are just too many negative records all across the globe that make us want to close this chapter and move on to a better one quickly. While I certainly hope for a better 2021, I think it is important to also see that a lot of good happened in 2020 as well.

People came together to work toward a common goal, to protect the vulnerable, and look for practical solutions to very serious problems. More than any other year, 2020 has brought the world together in the fight against the pandemic, proving that it’s good health and time with our loved ones that matter more than anything else.

My team recently asked me about the biggest changes that 2020 brought to my life. On top of the list is certainly the amount of time I have spent in front of my screen and inversely proportional to that the little time I have spent traveling. While I enjoy being home more, I do miss the personal interactions with my colleagues and with our customers. But out of a crisis comes creativity, so we found new ways to connect with each other. This fall, for example, I adapted my schedule and went on a virtual trip to Asia.

When the pandemic hit, we took SAP’s mission to help the world run better and improve people’s lives very seriously. With everyone stuck in home office, we built the German Corona-Warn-App in just 50 days, in collaboration with Telekom and many other partners. The app has been downloaded over 24 million times since its launch in mid-June and is now also connected to the European gateway service. A great success that goes back to our open-source approach and decentralized data storage model, thereby also serving as an example for other warning apps.

Around 240,000 German residents were stranded abroad when the coronavirus halted global travel in March. We helped the German government to bring people back home by developing an emergency repatriation platform in under 24 hours. What impressed me during this project was how this team of 40 colleagues across three time zones worked tirelessly to bring this app to life. It also demonstrates the importance of a stable platform and the role of technology overall.

Faced with very new challenges this year, our customers turned to us for help – be it because their supply chains were in a lot of stress or because they were under severe financial pressure. What most of them have in common is the need for agility and quick time-to-value. This is why we continued to drive SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) forward as the technical foundation of our strategy. Customers like Paul Hartmann used SAP BTP to improve their medical supply process – in only four weeks they developed a dashboard that plans and predicts medical demand and supply in the future, helping to solve severe societal challenges. Similarly, when the pandemic hit, Parkland Health & Hospital System built innovative solutions based on SAP BTP to deliver better patient care.

Providing our customers with the applications to run the most critical end-to-end business processes, all while giving them the flexibility to integrate and extend their IT landscape and deriving value from their diverse data, has clearly become a necessity for every company today. I am proud that our efforts in this space didn’t go unnoticed – among other recognitions, SAP earned its first-ever leader position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service and Cloud Database Management Systems. We were also named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development Platforms and in the Forrester Wave Data Management for Analytics.

Another big highlight for me and tremendous team achievement was this year’s TechEd event, an all-virtual, free, two-day non-stop learning conference that we hosted for our developer community and everyone interested in technology topics. More than 6.6 million people watched Channel 1, which is where we broadcast a rolling agenda of 48 hours of content and had moderators entertaining our attendees live in between sessions. Our audiences enjoyed a completely new event experience, with a mix of on-demand, live, deep-dive, and interactive sessions. Here are a couple of Tweets that really made my day when I saw them:

As the year draws to a close and we are still in the grips of a worldwide pandemic, many of us tend to think about what could have been better. I would like to encourage you to focus on what brought you joy and what were the silver linings. Looking back at the past 12 months, for me these were the bright spots that make me grateful and that lit up the bumpy road 2020. I am confident that the lessons we learned and the experiences we made along the journey will help us to tackle whatever is up next. I wish you and your families a wonderful holiday season and a healthy start to 2021!