Lau­ra Tibodeau, ASUG Board Direc­tor, attend­ed exec­u­tive lead­er­ship meet­ings ear­li­er this fall at SAP’s head­quar­ters in Wall­dorf, Ger­many, as part of an annu­al vis­it for ASUG board mem­bers and senior staff lead­ers. Below are her expe­ri­ences and impres­sions for the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty.

Fol­low­ing last year’s vis­it, this was my sec­ond trip as an ASUG rep­re­sen­ta­tive to SAP’s Wall­dorf head­quar­ters. I trea­sured the oppor­tu­ni­ty to meet with the SAP exec­u­tive lead­er­ship team, includ­ing Jan Gilg, Pres­i­dent and Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, Cloud ERP at SAP; Thomas Sauer­es­sig, Exec­u­tive Board Mem­ber of SAP for SAP Prod­uct Engi­neer­ing; Sebas­t­ian Stein­haeuser, Chief Strat­e­gy Offi­cer at SAP; Juer­gen Mueller, Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer at SAP; Sven Deneck­en, SVP & Chief Mar­ket­ing and Solu­tions Offi­cer, SAP Indus­tries & CX at SAP; Bernd Bran­dl, Pres­i­dent and CRO of S/4HANA Pub­lic Cloud & Mid­mar­ket at SAP; and Philipp Herzig, SVP, Head of Cross Prod­uct Engi­neer­ing & Expe­ri­ence at SAP.

Our con­ver­sa­tions with the SAP exec­u­tive lead­er­ship team were unscript­ed, authen­tic and, in my opin­ion, huge­ly valu­able to both the SAP lead­ers and our ASUG trav­el­ing delegation. 

In Wall­dorf, the ASUG Board of Direc­tors pri­or­i­tized dis­cus­sions about pros and cons of pri­vate cloud and pub­lic cloud, tech upgrade dead­lines, licens­ing con­cerns, and the future of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. SAP lead­ers keen­ly and intent­ly lis­tened to the strug­gles, chal­lenges, and rec­om­men­da­tions that ASUG board mem­bers brought for­ward on behalf of our SAP cus­tomer base. SAP exec­u­tive lead­ers repeat­ed­ly rein­forced that SAP, in con­junc­tion with its part­ners, will work aggres­sive­ly to ensure that cus­tomers are not left behind because of SAP solu­tions reach­ing the end of main­stream main­te­nance or end of life.

While our dis­cus­sion top­ics were many and var­ied, preva­lent themes that emerged dur­ing our vis­it to Wall­dorf includ­ed adop­tion of the SAP RISE and GROW pro­grams, plans for embed­ding arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing (AI/ML) into SAP prod­ucts, the strate­gic val­ue and impor­tance of SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form, and the future of pri­vate and pub­lic cloud offerings.

SAP RISE and GROW

SAP advis­es cus­tomers to run SAP S/4HANA in SAP’s pri­vate or pub­lic cloud, so that they can quick­ly and effi­cient­ly real­ize busi­ness ben­e­fits from new prod­uct releas­es. Dur­ing our vis­it, SAP expressed its intent on find­ing ways to sim­pli­fy the move to RISE and SAP S/4HANA for cus­tomers, to help ear­ly SAP S/4HANA adopters get tech­ni­cal­ly cur­rent in prepa­ra­tion for end of main­stream main­te­nance, and to reduce the com­plex­i­ty of tech­ni­cal upgrades. 

SAP lead­er­ship com­mit­ted to improv­ing and eas­ing enable­ment of both RISE and inte­gra­tions to SAP cloud prod­ucts dur­ing the RISE ini­tial­iza­tion process. We dis­cussed how SAP could opti­mize RISE and GROW ini­tial­iza­tions and the increas­ing need for SAP to holis­ti­cal­ly mon­i­tor, detect, report, and resolve issues — across the core, the cloud, API process­es, and microser­vices — for end-to-end line of sight.

AI, ML, and Gen­er­a­tive AI

Amid plen­ty of excite­ment about gen­er­a­tive AI and large lan­guage mod­els (LLMs), we were eager to gain insights from SAP on how AI will be embed­ded into SAP prod­ucts. Accord­ing to exec­u­tive lead­ers, SAP is cur­rent­ly work­ing, invest­ing, staffing, and expand­ing its part­ner net­work to become the lead­ing busi­ness AI com­pa­ny by 2025. We learned that SAP is one of the found­ing mem­bers of Europe’s AI Ethics Coun­cil, and that SAP has sev­er­al active cus­tomer projects under­way on which they’ve part­nered with Microsoft’s Azure Ope­nAI ser­vice to solve busi­ness challenges.

SAP also dis­cussed Joule, its new gen­er­a­tive AI assis­tant, dur­ing our vis­it to Wall­dorf. We learned that Joule and SAP’s Gen­er­a­tive AI Hub will serve as the gate­way for cus­tomers to access SAP’s under­ly­ing AI toolset.

SAP BTP and Clean Core

SAP strong­ly encour­ages its cus­tomers to lever­age their pre-built inte­gra­tion com­po­nents, exten­sions, and appli­ca­tions avail­able on SAP BTP to accel­er­ate their time to imple­ment SAP S/4HANA as well as to reduce the com­plex­i­ty of man­ag­ing and main­tain­ing cus­tomized platforms. 

As such, cus­tomers must insti­tute strong gov­er­nance process­es to ensure that SAP S/4HANA is min­i­mal­ly cus­tomized, [keep­ing their cores clean.] SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Sig­navio, and now LeanIX are part of SAP’s trans­for­ma­tion suite of offer­ings intend­ed to facil­i­tate the move to SAP S/4HANA.

In con­clu­sion, this trip to Wall­dorf gave ASUG a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to share key obser­va­tions and sug­ges­tions with SAP’s lead­er­ship team, and to advance SAP prod­ucts and ser­vices. A sig­nif­i­cant focus was afford­ed to RISE with SAP, gen­er­a­tive AI, and SAP BTP, while our con­ver­sa­tions were col­lab­o­ra­tive, pos­i­tive, and high­ly pro­duc­tive. I’m appre­cia­tive and grate­ful for the oppor­tu­ni­ty extend­ed to rep­re­sent our ASUG mem­ber­ship on this impor­tant annu­al journey.

Lau­ra Tibodeau is ASUG Board Director.