WALLDORF — SAP AG announced plans to bring industry solutions to the cloud by combining its unrivaled expertise in industry-specific business processes with the technical creativity of its global ecosystem and broad customer base. To meet this goal, SAP has created a dedicated Industry Cloud organization, led by Simon Paris, in which the company’s historic industry strength will be used to develop prescriptive, industry-based cloud road maps that will help simplify and transform businesses.
SAP plans to co-innovate with customers and partners to deliver industry-specific solutions expected to rapidly proliferate across the 25 industries SAP serves. In the industry cloud model, partners and customers are envisioned to co-innovate with SAP on industry cloud offerings. These industry cloud solutions are anticipated to offer customers specialized, next-generation business processes and intuitive interfaces that can be easily and quickly deployed across a public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure, depending on which model best serves the customer’s needs. These industry cloud solutions are intended to run on SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA via SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, a fully managed, subscription-based cloud service used by customers today to run mission-critical SAP applications and manage vast amounts of Big Data all on one real-time business platform.
“Working in industries with highly specialized challenges, we will focus on our customers’ most relevant business problems and then work creatively and collaboratively to develop industry cloud solutions,” said Paris. “With SAP’s proven integration, consistency and coherency across all lines of business, mobile, analytics and technology, we are primed to deliver the deepest and broadest industry cloud solutions in the world, offering tremendous value to our significant customer base, our-ever growing number of new SAP customers and the global SAP ecosystem.”
Cloud-Based Momentum Climbing Across Industries
SAP has already achieved notable success in leading the way to the industry cloud model, including in the following industries:
Chemicals
To better serve the chemical industry, SAP has launched a “chemical-company-in-a-box” solution, offering pre-configured enterprise resource planning (ERP) for chemical manufacturers in the cloud. Supporting industry-specific requirements, SAP is partnering with Qnovate with plans to develop chemical-specific functionality for the SAP Cloud for Customer solution, and is already delivering a cloud-based service for product safety and hazardous materials management with the SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand solution.
Financial Services
In corporate banking, SAP has developed the innovative SAP Financial Services Network, which helps simplify transactions between corporations and financial institutions. The network offers multiple services over one single channel while supporting the deployment of new services. Customers like Visa, Inc. and Citibank N.A. use SAP Financial Services Network to help reduce payment rejection rates and provide enhanced visibility to corporate treasury.
To enable insurers to quickly offer the right insurance offerings to clients, SAP has introduced the SAP Circular Authority for Insurance application, a cloud-based solution for tracking, interpreting and analyzing Insurance Service Office (ISO) circulars. The intuitive user experience provides quick, concise insights into circular changes while helping to reduce overall regulatory management efforts and costs.
In the area of fostering new innovation in the banking and payments industry, SAP has become a global sponsor of the SWIFT 2014 Innotribe Startup Challenge, a year-round program that offers up-and-coming entrepreneurs the opportunity to showcase new concepts and products to leading global financial institutions and early-stage investors. This initiative supports young companies dedicated to bringing new and innovative solutions that can help transform the industry and improve people’s financial lives around the world.
Healthcare
In healthcare, SAP HANA is increasingly the co-innovation platform of choice for select personalized care startups, including Vancouver’s PHEMI, which has introduced a Big Data Services Platform that lets healthcare organizations offer value-based services like personalized medicine, population health management, business intelligence, research registries and more.
Higher Education & Research
To support education, SAP has undertaken multiple design thinking sessions with universities worldwide to develop a next-generation cloud-based student information system (SIS). SAP intends to offer higher education institutions the best of both worlds: access to a redesigned SIS built for cloud, mobile and 21st-century students and administrators as well as the ability to extend and take advantage of existing SAP investments.
Industrial Machinery and Components
The convergence of the classical world of machines with the internet, referred to as “Industry 4.0” or “Industrial Internet,” has created a host of new opportunities. SAP is working with leading manufacturers to build solutions based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform for predictive maintenance and service in a co-innovation approach. With this type of solution, companies are envisioned to be able to significantly improve their service model and ultimately move toward a usage-based business model with their customers.
Professional Services
Transforming the bid management process for project-based professional services customers through the cloud, SAP for Professional Services solutions link the bid management sales process directly with project execution. The offerings are designed to help firms to win more deals, improve profitability and secure execution against project plans by integrating SAP Cloud for Customer, the SAP Jam social software platform, the SAP Commercial Project Management application and business intelligence analytics capabilities developed specifically for the professional services industry.
Public Services
For social services, SAP has become a Code for America Brigade sponsor in 2014, partnering with the developer community and connecting the grassroots skills and energy of more than 3,000 volunteers worldwide to SAP technology and innovation, including free developer access.
Retail
For customer insight, SAP has launched the SAP Customer Activity Repository application, a retail data repository powered by the SAP HANA platform that serves as an underlying foundation for all operations. This enables retailers to leverage the true potential of omni-commerce as well as the demand for the personalization for the individualized shopping experience. Recent efforts have been made by SAP partner gicom, which is working to provide one of the first solutions built on SAP Customer Activity Repository.
Sports
In athletic event planning, cloud-based SAP Event Ticketing software helps to generate ticket sales for events across all sales channels, offering an overview of customers and costs to maximize revenue per seat.
For player management, the SAP Scouting solution helps executives, coaches and scouts identify and acquire talent, compare draftees in real time and ultimately help put the best product on the field. The cloud-based solution provides advanced capabilities for both college and professional scouting, offering new insights and the tools to efficiently asses and compare players.
Travel and Transportation
SAP enables travel providers to better connect with their passengers and partners to create a new revenue stream with consumer engagement solutions from SAP. The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) is combining a top-ranked mobile app with the cloud-based SAP Precision Marketing solution and SAP HANA to connect passengers to retailers and event, sport and cultural venues to deliver compelling, personalized offers in real time. STM was recognized as an innovation leader with the Constellation Research SuperNova Award for redefining the passenger travel experience.
“We intend to shake things up for ourselves and the market by asking a new generation of customers to help us solve their next-generation business problems,” said Christoph Behrendt, senior vice president, Products & Innovation, and head of Industry Cloud, SAP. “They can imagine forward-looking industry-specific use cases better than any team of in-house software developers. Industry IT leaders are going to embrace a partnership that brings together their needs with the deep industry expertise of SAP to co-innovate elegant, simple solutions for the cloud.”
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