By Freya Purnell
SAP’s biggest annual event, SAPPHIRE NOW, has kicked off in Orlando, and among the first announcements is that SAP Fiori user experience and SAP Screen Personas software will now be included free with SAP software licences.
Existing customers will receive a software credit redeemable against future software sales.
“We want every SAP customer to run simple with a world-class user experience,” said Bill McDermott, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP. “Judging by the commercial success of SAP Fiori, it’s clear that our customers agree. Some customers and our user groups believe we shouldn’t charge for SAP Fiori. We listened to our customers, I agree with them and now SAP Fiori is included with SAP software.”
Currently, there are more than 300 apps that use the SAP Fiori UX.
To help accelerate the adoption of UX innovations for end users, SAP also announced it will offer a complete portfolio of user experience services, for a separate fee. The company will also make the tools and modern design guidelines for UX development available for developers to create their own solutions, which includes key portions of SAPUI framework as open source code.
The SAP Australian User Group welcomed the announcement, having worked with fellow members of the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN), to take concerns about Fiori being licensed separately to SAP.
Another key announcement was the launch of SAP Simple Finance, a set of finance solutions delivered by SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA.
The Simple Finance suite enables finance departments to run mission-critical processes in real time – including planning, analysis, accounting, consolidation, treasury, financial operations, risk and compliance – via a secure cloud.
To be made available in more than 50 countries, with customisation for local requirements, SAP Simple Finance will provide the most simple and unified end-to-end experience for easy adoption.
Customers can also deploy the SAP Fiori user experience for personalised, responsive and simple interactions across most common financial tasks.
Among the suite’s new capabilities include:
- A single source of truth between transactions and analytics to streamline and eliminate cycle time and data reconcilitations
- On-the-fly capabilities for moving finance processing from batch to real time,
- Innovative rapid planning and forecasting with predictive analysis, and
- Self-service reporting and analytics capabilities for finance users.
“The launch of SAP Simple Finance defines a completely new era with solutions designed to help our customers foster agility, flexibility and therewith simplicity in every business process,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the executive board of SAP, products and innovation. “CFOs and finance departments can now augment their strategic role in driving the business performance with real-time analytics and planning capabilities delivered in the cloud.”
SAP Simple Finance is offered with subscription pricing and can be deployed as a managed service via SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. It can also be connected to other cloud and on-premise applications in a hybrid deployment model, including other key SAP applications and to the Ariba Network.
Joshua Greenbaum, principal analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting, said the launch of SAP Simple Finance is a major step forward in how enterprise software is used for financial operations.
“It combines the ease of cloud-based deployment, a full set of standard financial functions and net new functionality that enables a company to conduct a soft financial close and model different financial scenarios. The result is not just better day-to-day financial management, but also an improved financial planning and execution function that can help companies stay abreast of rapidly changing market conditions,” Greenbaum said.
