5 Key Issues SAP Must Nail at Sapphire

May 19, 2023

To maintain and perhaps even accelerate its outstanding momentum in the cloud, SAP needs to use next week's Sapphire mega-event in Orlando to bring greater clarity and customer-oriented specificity to five key issues.

No doubt SAP's leaders have their own set of priorities for Sapphire, but as someone who's followed the company and its customers for a number of years, I’d like to suggest that these topics are either not yet fully understood, are in transition and in need of immediate clarity, or simply don't match up with the product-centric positioning that often dominates the agendas of big annual events like Sapphire.

So here's my shortlist for what should be top-priority topics at Sapphire, and then I’ll offer a few comments about each:

Launched one month ago, Datasphere is described in a blog post written by CTO Juergen Mueller as "the next generation of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, but with new capabilities that enhance data discovery, modeling, and distribution." So as business customers are just becoming comfortable with this type of modern solution as a "data cloud," why isn't SAP leaning into that widely accepted term? Why is it going down the wonky path of "data fabric" when that's a term understood by about 1% of the business leaders involved in picking sophisticated cloud-based data-management solutions?

My Suggestion: Since business leaders are extremely interested in unleashing the power of their data in a variety of ways and particularly around building new revenue streams based on their data, don't make it more complicated for them to figure out what the heck Datasphere is!

A couple of years ago, I thought SAP was in a terrific position to become one of the world's leaders — perhaps even the leader — in industry-specific solutions. SAP had decades-long relationships with the world's largest companies across 25 industries, it had deep vertical knowledge and expertise, it had a strong network of vertical partners, and it had some powerful solutions.

But as of right now, I find it difficult to discern SAP's interest in industry-specific solutions — and this is coming at a time when the world's other top applications vendors (including Oracle, Salesforce, and Workday) are becoming much more focused on how their vertical solutions can drive significant value and innovation for customers looking to create new digital business models.

My Suggestion: This is one of the fastest-growing and highest-potential categories in the cloud, and SAP cannot afford either to be or appear to be only mildly interested. Whatever SAP's new vision for industries happens to be, I hope they make that unmistakably clear at Sapphire and throughout all of 2023.

This one's pretty simple: CEO Christian Klein, head of global customer success Scott Russell, and other SAP execs have been effusive in their praise for RISE, which was launched almost 2-1/2 years ago. On last month's earnings call, Klein said it was one of the most successful launches the company's ever had. So what are customers saying about RISE?

My Suggestion: For a company that can be appropriately fixated on data, surely SAP has accumulated some powerful data about RISE customers. Without giving away any deep secrets, surely there are some metrics SAP could share about the great outcomes RISE customers are having. If SAP does so, I’ll be that will help its new and somewhat parallel program for first-time SAP customers, called GROW, get off to a fast start.

As the world's largest provider of enterprise apps, SAP needs to position itself as not just keeping up in the GenAI revolution, but also being a high-impact and high-innovation leader.

My Suggestion: Talk's cheap — I hope SAP comes to Sapphire with a highly ambitious portfolio of GenAI solutions, some of which should be available immediately with lots more coming very soon.

A year ago at Sapphire, chief marketing and solutions officer Julia White gave a dynamite presentation showing how SAP's modern cloud-based apps can seamlessly fuse supply chains — a subject that at that time was on everybody's mind, much as ChatGPT is today — with demand chains. As businesses in every industry look to control costs while also finding ways to boost revenue, this is a capability with a huge upside. And I hope SAP decides to capitalize on that.

My Suggestion: For too long, the tech industry has boxed these types of solutions into their separate boxes: ERP over here, HCM over there, CX/CRM somewhere else. That language and the outdated processes it represents are long-gone, and I hope SAP will not only showcase its unique abilities but also do so in the language of customers desperate to have those new customer-centric digital capabilities.

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