Thursday 17, May 2012

SAP, has announced its accelerated cloud strategy cloud solutions for four lines of business to manage people, money, customers and suppliers. These are planned to be offered in a consistent way and seamlessly integrated into enterprise resource planning (ERP) business software. SAP will use the market strengths of SuccessFactors, an SAP company.

"As a long-time customer of both SAP and SuccessFactors, we see this strategy as a clear way forward, harnessing and streamlining the best of what each side brings to the table," said Troy Barnett, director of HR Processes, Under Armour. "SAP has the process and industry expertise that we rely on every day to run our business, and SuccessFactors gives us cloud applications that our teammates love to use. With the resources at SAP’s disposal coupled with Lars’ vision and passion, we expect great things from this combination."

"The cloud is a completely new paradigm. Our team of 5,000 will provide customers and all their people with rock-solid access to best-in-class business functionality for people, money, customers and suppliers," said Dalgaard, SAP Executive Board member. "They aim for the highest level of reliable security in the cloud. We will provide integration among the cloud solutions and external content out-of-the-box with on-premise business software. We are passionate about bringing creative and innovative first-in-class applications to market with a beautiful user experience."

Since the close of SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors in February 2012, the combined teams immediately joined forces to begin delivering on an accelerated cloud strategy. Together, and with Dalgaard at the helm of the combined Cloud business unit, SAP is now investing more than 5,000 people dedicated to designing, building and delivering cloud solutions that enable people to love work again and perform at their best. The newly formed Cloud business unit, serving more than 17 million users, will be focused on four solution areas aimed at helping customers manage their most business-critical assets and relationships.

SAP plans to deliver its multitenant cloud solutions as a loosely-coupled suite of best-of-breed applications. The company plans to offer customers the choice and flexibility to adopt these applications at their own pace, as their business needs evolve. When used together, these applications aim to offer the value of a single solution with a consistent user and customer experience, process and data integrity. The cloud portfolio will focus on solutions that help SAP customers better manage People, Money and Customers;

• Money: With decades of deep expertise in global localization of sophisticated financial applications, SAP announced the planned availability of the SAP® Financials OnDemand solution, targeted for large enterprise customers to manage their core financials as well as order-to-cash and invoice-to-pay processes. It is planned to be integrated with SuccessFactors’ core HR solution Employee Central. In addition, SAP intends to deliver a new release of the SAP® Travel OnDemand solution with additional integration and mobile capabilities, including the ability to capture and process expenses directly from a mobile device.
• Suppliers: Supplier interaction continues to be a key lever for customers. SAP intends to invest in the SAP® Sourcing OnDemand solution for strategic sourcing, supplier and contract lifecycle management integrated on premise with SAP Business Suite, as well as its business networks solutions, including the SAP® Information Interchange OnDemand solution, for networked-based invoice management and information exchange for the procure-to-pay process.