Hello 2020!

Greetings from our annual development kick-off meeting (#SAPdkom) 2020! This time, I took the stage with our CTO Juergen Mueller in Karlsruhe in front of the many colleagues onsite and thousands around the globe watching online. I couldn’t imagine a better way to start the new development year than among colleagues.

Last year, my team and I prepared the keynote around Christmas and the New Year; however, this year I wanted the team to enjoy their well-deserved break over the holidays. In my opinion, spending time with your loved ones or doing what you like to do gives you more energy and creativity than any brainstorming session or alignment meeting. That is why we sat together in December several times to finalize the content, and I would like to thank all colleagues involved for their dedication and the great support!

The theme of last year’s keynote was “You never win alone.” Now, one year later, I can only say that these words are still so true, so I would like to shout out a BIG THANK YOU to all our teams for what they made possible in 2019.

For 2020, we will continue with our path and build on the groundwork we did in 2019, considering the internal and external feedback we asked for last year. Let me share our focus areas for this coming year: employee and customer success, innovation and integration, as well as simplification and agility as the enabler for the previously mentioned areas.

Where we have come from

ERP is a success story, and SAP is the indisputable pioneer in this area. We moved from mainframe, to client-server, to mobile and in-memory, and now on to the cloud. A few years ago, we used the slogan “Our code runs the world.” I love this one because it still holds true today: More than 70% of transactions worldwide touch an SAP system.

These days, many companies have large and highly customized ERP systems – covering all the various aspects of very complex business processes. Adding to that complexity, organizations often combine solutions from different software vendors. Integration across these different solutions, as well as consistent data models and user interfaces, has been a challenge for years.

Basically, we as SAP are facing the same challenges as our customers do: We need to adapt and introduce new business models to be able to react to ever-changing customer expectations. This means modernizing our core solutions following cloud qualities, as well as integrating them with the cloud LoB solutions.

As I already mentioned, we have heard our customers’ and the market’s feedback loud and clear, and we will take it very seriously. At this years’ d-kom event, Steffen Pietsch, Board Member for Technology of the German-speaking User Group DSAG, openly told us what is needed to continue and further grow SAP’s long-standing and trustful relationship with our customers.

But first, let me share a highlight that will be in focus for 2020 and which is dear to my heart.

The future of ERP is sustainable

SAP S/4HANA is like a modern navigation system for companies. I’m not afraid to say that I think it is the most comprehensive, integrated, and intelligent ERP on the market and can be deployed everywhere: in the cloud on the hyperscale vendor of our customers’ choice, on-premise, or in hybrid scenarios.

However, as mentioned before, we need to do our homework to move from a big suite approach to a modular approach while keeping the highly integrated nature of a suite. Therefore, we are in the midst of a transformation towards a more modular architecture for our core. This will give us the agility and flexibility to adapt to ever-changing customer needs. In addition, we will further push offering APIs to support extensibility of our solutions through a lively ecosystem.

While we often speak about today’s challenges, we should not forget to look ahead. One of the biggest challenges of our time, if not the biggest of all, is climate change. With ERP as the linchpin of the business world, we have the power at least to slow down these developments. When we can realize seamlessly integrated businesses processes, we must remember our obligation to not use it only to improve the top or bottom line but also to support sustainable and fair production and delivery along the entire supply and value chains. So, in my opinion, the future ERP will continue to combine business and technology and should also be the enabler of a more sustainable world.

The concept around Industry 4.0 perfectly demonstrates why businesses need to think and act end-to-end. We see many companies that have already made Industry 4.0 an integral part of their digital transformation strategy. With increasing demand for hyper-personalized but also fair and sustainably manufactured products, end-to-end integrated business processes are even more important than ever. They ensure a seamless customer experience, which spans across the entire value chain. So, companies are required to offer new business models and services and to consider relevant processes connecting the value chain, such as sales, engineering, manufacturing, procurement, logistics, financials, and services. However, it’s not an easy task in a global business environment characterized by diverging markets and increasing volatility, changing demands, and global competition.

We are working on enabling these end-to-end business processes for our customers so they can manage the complexity that comes with individualized, sustainable products through flexible and seamless engineering and manufacturing processes. Our solutions bring manufacturing, logistics, sales, and service together in an orchestrated way – from the edge to the core and from the factory to the board room.

I’m sure there will be many opportunities to discuss this topic in more depth at the upcoming World Economic Forum in Davos.

Where we are heading

Employee and customer success: This sounds very ambitious, but I’m more than confident that our engineers will get this job done. During my keynote, I encouraged our colleagues to look at problems in new ways and take action and approach the challenges outlined before with a “just code it” attitude. When visiting some of our demo booths here at SAP d-kom and diving into some of our innovations, I was really impressed by both our colleagues and their projects. So “just code it” sums it up perfectly.

Innovation and integration: We as a company will put a strong focus on organic growth and innovation related to our existing product portfolio in 2020. This includes all our integration efforts. Let me be very clear here: It’s integration and innovation – not either or. During Juergen’s and my keynote, our colleagues Andrea Fluegel and Joerg Franke demonstrated how Qualtrics is being used in SAP S/4HANA to realize new customer requirements, for example, related to Analytics capabilities and to ship them with the next release to all customers. SAP Analytics Cloud embedded in SAP S/4HANA and integrated with Qualtrics provides consistent user experience. This is what our customers want to see across our entire portfolio, and we make it our focus in 2020.

Agility and simplification: We at SAP will continue to challenge ourselves every day to make the lives of our customers easier and to remove road blocks in our daily work. Going the path of asking for regular feedback, followed by evaluating and realizing the top concerns from colleagues and end users will give us the focus to improve continuously. As our demo showed, the direct end user feedback can be implemented much faster using Qualtrics – a great addition to our portfolio.

With that, I’m wishing everyone a wonderful start into 2020, off to a great year 2020!