By Anne Widjaja and Freya Purnell
SAP AG has today unveiled cloud solutions for four new lines of business to manage people, money, customers and suppliers, which will be integrated into SAP’s enteprise resource planning (ERP) software and leverage the strengths of newly acquired cloud provider, SuccessFactors.
The accelerated cloud strategy was announced at SAPPHIRE NOW, taking place in Orlando, Florida.
Following the acquisition earlier this year, SAP and SuccessFactors have formed a combined cloud business unit of more than 5000 people dedicated to designing, building and delivering cloud solutions, led by former SuccessFactors founder and CEO and current SAP executive board member, Lars Dalgaard. The unit will serve more than 17 million users.
SAP plans to deliver the multitenant cloud solutions as a “loosely-coupled” suite of best-of-breed applications which can be used separately, enabling businesses to adopt the applications at their own pace and to best suit their needs.
Used together, the applications will function as a single consistent solution.
The cloud portfolio will include solutions focused on the following areas:
- People: SAP has announced that its payroll software will be offered as a cloud-based solution, integrated with SuccessFactors’ core human resources solution, Employee Central. To be released in 10 different countries, the offering will be available through a number of strategic partners as a platform for business process outsourcing (BPO) services, and cover end-to-end HR processes.
- Money: SAP will make available the SAP Financials OnDemand solution, which will also be integrated with SuccessFactors Employee Central. Additionally, SAP will deliver a new release of SAP Travel OnDemand with new integration and mobile capabilities, including capturing and processing expenses directly from mobile devices.
- Customers: SAP Sales OnDemand solution has been updated with new configurability and customisation tools and new integration to on-premise SAP Business Suite software. SAP also announced the general availability of SAP Customer Engagement OnDemand for businesses to engage with customers via social media.
- Suppliers: SAP will invest in SAP Sourcing OnDemand solution for strategic sourcing, supplier and contract lifecycle management integrated on premise with SAP Business Suite, as well as business network solutions including SAP Information Interchange OnDemand.
Driving development of all the new solutions will be a ‘social, mobile, analytics-first’ approach. Built-in social collaboration features and a user-friendly interface will be powered by the SAP HANA platform, and integrated with on-premise solutions to help businesses achieve value through their use of cloud solutions.
SAP announced plans to make available SAP NetWeaver Cloud as its unified Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, also to be powered by HANA. To create an open environment, SAP will partner with third-party PaaS offerings including VMware Cloud Foundry that customers will be able to use with NetWeaver Cloud to extend SAP solutions.
Recognising that IT landscapes will continue to be heterogenous, SAP has flagged its intention to deliver a cloud-based integration technology, comprised of on-demand solutions for process integration and data services, with out-of-the-box solutions to connect the on-demand line-of-business solutions to other SAP solutions.
SAP said it will also offer its own cloud-based integration technology for integration to third-party solutions, and will enable ecosystem partner solutions from Dell Boomi, IBM Cast Iron and Mulesoft.
Finally, SAP reaffirmed its commitment to continue to offer fully integrated products in the cloud, including SAP Business ByDesign and SAP Business One OnDemand.
