SAP executives and customers took center stage during the second keynote address of SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference to discuss how the software company’s cloud computing solutions can help customers to set a foundation to embrace next-generation innovations, including artificial intelligence.
Following the day-one keynote, during which SAP articulated its vision for an SAP Business Suite powered by a “flywheel” of applications, data, and AI, the day-two keynote explored the experiences of customers leveraging SAP’s transformation-as-a-service offerings to jump-start their cloud migrations and facilitate enterprise-wide digital transformation.
“The work we do today will actually enable our tomorrow,” said Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE leading SAP Customer Services & Delivery. “Today’s transformations will actually power tomorrow’s resilience.”
Jan Gilg, Chief Revenue Officer & President for SAP Americas and the SAP Global Business Suite organization, joined Saueressig on stage to highlight RISE with SAP—SAP’s flagship service for large-scale enterprise cloud migration—as an increasingly crucial tool for legacy SAP customers to achieve faster transformation and increased agility in times of macroeconomic volatility and technological complexity.
“The cloud has unlocked the ability to embrace technology much, much faster,” Gilg said. However, as IT landscapes grow, “the challenge of making everything work together is exponentially harder,” he said.
Overcoming Modern Business Hurdles
Throughout the conference, SAP struck a pragmatic note, grounding its presentation of evolving technology in the real-world context of a business climate marked by shifting tariffs and global uncertainties.
“We live in a changed world,” Saueressig said. “At the end of the day, agility is not optional.”
Geoff Scott, CEO & Chief Community Champion at ASUG, joined Saueressig and Gilg onstage, echoing this sentiment and encouraging customers to “come back to simplicity so we can react and be in front of uncertainty.”
A crucial part of this journey—according to both ASUG and SAP—involves cleaning and unifying enterprise data, ensuring IT environments are ready for next-generation solutions.
“What we as a customer community are going to need to get our arms around,” said Scott, “is how we get this data in these amazing SAP systems unlocked, so we can drive important business decisions.”
Scott emphasized the particular importance of this process as customers contend with global uncertainty in the current business climate and continue to invest in modernizing their IT landscapes.
Especially with agentic AI unlocking additional opportunities for businesses to boost productivity and achieve longer-term strategic objectives, the key to doing so involves establishing an integrated enterprise foundation, one that can break down business siloes and democratize access to enterprise-wide data.
To this end, added Gilg, SAP’s vision of the unified SAP Business Suite involves leveraging mission-critical data within fully integrated applications that can connect to Business AI and unlock unprecedented efficiency within business processes.
In the ASUG community, Scott added, members are increasingly focused on ensuring that any such infusions of AI align closely with longer-term strategic goals and are monitored to ensure they are driving the kinds of productivity gains and time-to-value that both business and IT leaders need to see.
Mercedes-Benz Accelerates Value via RISE with SAP
Joining Saueressig on stage, Mercedes-Benz CIO Katrin Lehmann shared how the automotive company’s journey to the cloud via RISE with SAP, initiated last year, has additionally enabled the organization to “accelerate processes and leverage innovation” while experimenting with custom AI applications, such as Mercedes-Benz Direct Chat.
With over 10,000 applications in its IT landscape—1,200 of which are SAP, running on SAP ECC—Mercedes-Benz understood the scale and complexity that would be required for its technology infrastructure to successfully shift into the cloud. SAP LeanIX played a key role in enabling Lehmann’s team to determine which systems were highest priority for the first phase of the organization’s migration and which could be safely scheduled for the second phase.
With the organization still in the midst of its RISE journey, Lehmann said Mercedes-Benz is looking forward to leveraging innovative technologies, including Joule. She articulated that the organization’s RISE journey has been the catalyst for the company to consider embracing these AI solutions.
Phoenix Global Details its GROW Journey
Jeff Suellentrop, Chief Information & Technology Officer at Phoenix Global, took to the keynote stage to discuss the metals and mining services company’s experience leveraging GROW with SAP.
Building upon insights shared in his recent episode of the ASUG Talks podcast, Suellentrop discussed how the capital-intensive business run by Phoenix Global and its rapid growth, combined with “economic headwinds,” once caused it to fall into bankruptcy.
To drive more capital back into the business, Phoenix Global decided to undertake a complete transition to SAP to “replace every system” and overhaul “pen and paper” processes, shifting to the public cloud and streamlining operations every step of the way.
“We really had to act fact,” Suellentrop said. “And it was a huge lift. We went live within eight months.”
However, by leveraging GROW, adopting IT best practices, and building out a full data model, the organization turned its financials around, and Suellentrop reported that profitability is back up.
“We have returned millions and millions of dollars back into the business,” he said.
Mars, Incorporated Discusses How SAP Helped Facilitated Business Growth
Finally, attendees heard from Mars, the American multinational manufacturer behind confectionery brands like M&M, Dove, Galaxy, Skittles, and Snickers.
Will Beery, Vice President and Global CIO at Mars Snacking, and Praveen Moturu, Global Vice President of Enterprise Digital Platforms at Mars Information Services, came on stage to demonstrate how the organization leverages the SAP Business Suite to keep its food production and retail business growing, especially amid high-profile acquisitions.
With Mars facilitating acquisitions of organizations like Tru Fru while operating various retail locations, the company requires an IT partner capable of facilitating the expansion of those discrete businesses and developing a digital foundation for the larger organization.
“When you think about our digital strategy and the architecture that needs to be there to enable these businesses, [they] need to be global, be able to scale, and also [they] have to be ready for those acquisitions to easily plug in and pull from the larger business,” Beery said.
He noted that the organization’s work leveraging SAP Public Cloud enables Mars to adopt an agile IT infrastructure for its acquisitions, a RISE instance for its retail business, and a customized SAP S/HANA instance to run core IT functions.
Moturu discussed how the iconic brand is already leveraging SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) to bring a “standardized and simplified” data model structure. By standardizing its data model and strategy with BDC, Mars has—according to Moturu—realized “huge productivity gains” as it implemented Joule throughout its IT stack.