By Freya Purnell
SAP is making some major investments in Australia to help public sector customers move to the cloud without undue risk and disruption, SAP Australia general manager, federal government and defence, Damien Bueno, told attendees at last week’s SAUG Canberra Conference.
Though the focus is now on the cloud playing a major role in ICT infrastructure, and in fact, a disruptive approach where all deployments are moved off premise and into the cloud, “in SAP’s view, that’s an oversimplistic approach to the problem. We think it’s part of the solution, but not simply by itself,” Bueno said.
He added that a significant number of its public sector customers have already moved business processes to the cloud, with examples including several Federal Government agencies using SuccessFactors for various human capital management functions, and the whole of Queensland Government moving to Ariba for procurement.
The SAP Institute for Digital Government (SIDG), which was originally announced in November, will provide a forum for customers and partners to come together to explore problems, undertake research and testing hypotheses that could then feed back into the core SAP product. It will have an initial focus in social protection, and the Department of Human Services and the NSW Office of State Revenue have been invited to be its first participating customers. It will also feature a Design Thinking centre to drive a “collaborative and empathetic approach to service design”. The SIDG is expected to officially open in June.
In the back office administration area, SAP is also working locally and globally to explore how its parallel innovations, such as HANA, core system development and user interface, as well as cloud platforms Concur and SuccessFactors, can be brought together in a reference architecture and reference system using best practice concepts, that will help public sector agencies “derisk” moves to new solutions and deployment models.
The creation of this reference architecture will be another focus for the SIDG, and SAP will be seeking to collaborate with customers during its development.
Bueno said SAP is also yet to finalise investment in a private cloud environment for government, but that it hopes to have an operational facility servicing customers in the September 2015 quarter.
