SAP Sapphire: 5 Big Issues They Need to Discuss

Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I outline five key issues SAP must address at Sapphire to maintain its leadership as the fastest-growing enterprise software company.

Highlights

00:15 — This week, we will see about 25 or 30,000 people head to Orlando, Florida, for SAP Sapphire and their annual customer and partner event there. I would like to suggest there are five big issues that I hope SAP will address.

01:34 — First: It’s clear AI is enhancing the franchise. We’re seeing in the tech industry two schools of thought. One is that the rise of agents is going to lead to the simultaneous collapse of enterprise applications. Because SAP has so many customers using its applications to run every part of their business, it’s important that SAP takes a position on this.

02:53 — The second big thing is, you know, feeding the AI beast. It’s recently come out, I think very importantly, with its Business Data Cloud. I think that is going to be the key to helping it pull together all of the relevant data, both from SAP and non-SAP systems, helping make that available to feed the AI solutions and capabilities that it is presenting there.

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03:28 — Third, Industry Clouds and the Business Data Cloud. With the rise of supply chains and customers demanding things to move as fast as humanly possible, this notion of industry clouds is getting more important. As is the need for a fantastic data capability. The Business Data Cloud could be what allows SAP to leverage its 50 years of data and expertise.

04:16 — Fourth, the Business Network has been around for a while, but only in the past year has SAP clarified, solidified, and optimized the position for the Business Network and its capabilities. There’s some question about where supply chain begins and ends.

04:45 — Finally, I’d love to see SAP do something like a hyperscaler report card. So, for Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud — all of which run lots and lots of SAP applications — what is SAP seeing among those? What are some of the trends? Which of these hyperscalers are gaining or losing market share among SAP customers? I think some insight on that would be great.

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