Tomorrow’s SAP Support Delivered Today

As an SAP ERP customer, you may be running an older version of SAP and will no doubt be considering your journey to S/4HANA in order to unlock additional business value and innovation from your SAP investment. It’s important that your SAP Partner has the method, tools, process and references to take you on your S/4HANA journey, including the potential to provide temporary Managed Cloud platforms that may well become redundant once the journey is completed.

SAP customers have the opportunity to extend their SAP Digital Core with additional Cloud Solutions from SAP. Whether you’re entering the HR world of SuccessFactors, considering e-procurement with Ariba or enhancing Customer Engagement with SAP CX applications, it’s important that your SAP Support Partner not only understands but can assist in the implementation and support of these extended solutions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Machine Learning (ML) are examples of emerging concepts where SAP is embedding the latest capabilities into its applications to give customers the benefit of powerful innovation within business processes. Equally, it’s important that your SAP Support Partner understands the latest innovations and is able to provide proactive advice, ideas and recommendations to take you to this new and exciting business systems paradigm.

As much as we might like to think it will be, in this new world, not everything connected to the SAP Digital Core will be from the SAP stable. You may have SAP and non-SAP Cloud applications already deployed, so it’s important your SAP Partner has the Cloud skills to support the integration points of your cloud landscape. Your SAP Support Partner needs to understand hybrid-cloud integration and be experienced in connecting non-SAP applications to the SAP Digital Core.

We are finding that customers with SAP and other legacy on-premise solutions are increasingly exploring alternatives to investing in and running their own data centres. There is a growing desire to put these systems in the Cloud, and in the case of SAP solutions, engaging their SAP Support Partner to manage them. Having an SAP partner who understands how to move these applications into the Cloud is equally important.

Whilst Analytics is becoming increasingly embedded in the SAP applications themselves, which in itself provides a massive leap forward for many customers, there is an increasing appetite for Enterprise Analytics pulling on data from disparate data sources and potentially serving such Analytics capabilities to end-users through Cloud applications. The world of Data and Analytics needs to be an integral consideration in your SAP journey and hence having an SAP Support partner with a deep understanding of how to develop and support your overarching Analytics strategy is increasingly important.

Your future SAP landscape may well manifest itself as a combination of On-Premise and Public Cloud applications that could themselves be integrated into non-SAP applications, also potentially in the Cloud. Accordingly, your SAP Support model needs to reflect the adoption of SAP public Cloud solutions, where support itself has a different meaning to the on-premise world and integration becomes a potential grey area. Your SAP Support partner needs to offer subtly different services to ensure that you understand the potential of new releases and where the conversation is more about adoption, changes in configuration and general advice and guidance than it is about break-fix.