Organizations are moving their SAP workloads to the cloud, either by replacing legacy hardware with flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure or with the adoption of cloud-based applications. But today’s cloud investments must provide more than just new and faster infrastructure, as organizations look to make those investments the basis for broader innovation. SAPinsider research has shown that nearly nine in ten organizations are running at least some SAP workloads in the cloud, and most are moving more to that environment. However, while the core infrastructure layer offered by cloud providers offers familiar benefits like performance, availability, and security, organizations are looking at their cloud providers to help them be more agile and help provide new levels of innovation. This is where organizations moving to the cloud need to look beyond infrastructure to how their cloud investments can provide a platform for innovation. To learn more about the focus and goals of organizations looking at the cloud, particularly as it comes to their SAP workloads, SAPinsider sat down with Mike Harding and Dinesh Vandayar from Google Cloud. Harding is the Google Cloud Partner Manager for SAP, and Vandayar is the Go-to-Market Lead for RISE with SAP at Google Cloud. Both have years of experience in the cloud space and working with SAP customers.

The Business Case for the Cloud is Changing

Regardless of where you are with your move to the cloud, building the business case is where the journey started. But, according to Harding, many organizations are now looking beyond the traditional notions of digitization, speed to market, and minimizing disruption. While these remain crucial to the overall success of cloud projects, there is now an increased interest in sustainability as a major factor in the business cases organizations are building. “What’s been trending in our customer base more and more is how they measure sustainability,” says Harding. “It could be as simple as a reduced carbon footprint they can achieve by moving to Google Cloud, or the ability to reduce waste and deliver greener solutions to their customers.” “When an organization sells an item, their customer wants to understand and track how the commodity was sourced,” Vandayar agrees. “How fair were the practices involved? How fair is the pricing? Did the producer of the commodity get a fair price? This is now a business requirement we’re seeing from organizations.” Vandayar has also seen organizations looking to leverage services like Google Earth to review satellite imagery so that they can evaluate the impact of deforestation as part of their overall sustainability goals. Another major factor in decision making around cloud is how the move to the cloud can be used as a driver for further innovation. This is where the additional features that a provider offers can be a significant differentiating factor. While availability, security posture, and even whether data traversing across regions needs to leave the provider’s network are all ways in which organizations can evaluate providers, what is most interesting for many is how the provider can help impact outcomes from a business perspective.

Data Should be at the Center of Your Cloud Plans

“The prototypical enterprise has a best-of-breed application approach with a combination of SAP and non-SAP applications,” Harding says. “Within the enterprise space, organizations want to combine what they have with a proliferation of data from sources like social, merchandising, shopping patterns, edge data signals, etc. And when you include data signals which influence supply chain such as weather patterns, traffic information, or indirect material costs, the reality is that all our customers are highlighting the need for a petabyte scale data platform.” This data is crucial for organizations that are trying to get predictive and real-time insight into the business. Organizations need platforms that allow them to take advantage of these different data sources, and also that offer the ability to run extremely large data footprints against artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platforms. Vandayar agrees. “If you look at a topic like demand planning, there’s a lot more factors that impact demand than just historical data. While most planning today is done based on sales history or shipment data, things are a lot more dynamic than that. Organizations need to enrich that historical data with data that represents factors like consumer insights, consumer trends, cost of shipment, cost of transportation, and other external factors and apply AI and ML on top of this to really enhance the forecast.” No matter what your initial cloud goals include, leveraging, combining, and bringing in additional data should be at the center of your long-term plans because this is where additional value can be added.

Innovation is Built with Your Cloud Provider

To achieve true innovation in the cloud you need to work closely with your provider. It is a combination of the data stored in your SAP applications leveraging features available through your cloud provider in conjunction with a platform like the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) acting as a bridge and extensibility layer that will provide the foundation for innovation. “We had a customer that wanted to inspect all of the components that are being manufactured, which isn’t a trivial problem,” says Vandayar. “Today they audit a select number of components, but to audit all of them they would need to increase the size of their labor force which in turn would increase costs. Working with SAP, we were able to create an application that put an edge camera on the assembly line and took images of every component passing through that assembly line. Using an ML model as the starting point and supporting data in SAP systems, in a few weeks we were able to inspect every single component on the line with a success rate of 90%. And the model will only learn and improve as more data is gathered.” Examples like this demonstrate how a cloud provider can work with SAP to provide innovative applications that address specific business challenges. Once a decision is made to move to the cloud, the turnaround can be very quick and within a few months an organization can have a live application. Leveraging a solution like SAP BTP can then enhance and enrich an existing business process. Google Cloud is starting to offer incentives to help customers innovate their business processes using SAP BTP, and plan to have over 20 use cases available by the end of 2022. With so many SAP workloads moving to the cloud, Vandayar sees an opportunity for customers to move their workloads quickly and then leverage microservices that can be accessed through SAP BTP to create an extremely agile platform. Harding agrees and says that not only can organizations adopt cloud quickly, at the same time they can start leveraging additional capabilities and technologies in parallel to see what they can achieve at the same time. This can turn moving to the cloud from being intimidating or daunting to something that can be done in a relevant, expeditious, and risk-free manner.

What does this mean for SAPinsiders?

Organizations move to the cloud for a variety of reasons. Some are looking to replace legacy systems and infrastructure with faster, more flexible, and more scalable hardware. Others are looking to leverage newer cloud-based technologies and solutions that provide features existing systems do not.  For others, it is about leveraging the operational expenditure model that the cloud offers. But no matter why you are moving to the cloud, what can you do to make that move as successful as possible?

• Build your business case for the cloud based on your long-term plans for the cloud, not your immediate needs. Many organizations focus on their immediate cloud needs when building their business case. While this is important, it can be just as important to think and plan about future possibilities when building that business case. Ensure that whatever you plan provides flexibility around how your cloud capabilities can be leveraged in the future, particularly when it comes to including technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide greater insight into data. While cloud configurations can be easily changed, having an understanding of future needs going in will help ensure that budget and ROI will be planned appropriately.
• Ensure that your plans for the cloud include leveraging your data beyond simply moving it into the new environment. Those doing a lift and shift to replace existing infrastructure with cloud-based landscapes may only be looking at how their systems can move into the new environment. However, leveraging technologies such as Google Cloud Cortex Framework, which provides packaged services and accelerators based on SAP BTP that directly connect to your existing SAP data to BigQuery, allows for your data to provide value far beyond that which it already provides in your SAP systems. Being able to leverage your data in combination with external data can yield enormous value in providing more context for trends in your data, but can also help make planning and forecasting much more accurate.
• Work closely with your cloud provider to provide the infrastructure and innovation that your organization needs to drive success. Historically a hosting partner simply provided the hosting capacity that an organization needed for their solutions. Today’s cloud providers are partners in your innovation just as much as they providing the platform supporting that innovation. Every hosting provider has teams that are working to make your move to the cloud successful, as well as offering services, tools, and technologies that can grow and innovate on that initial move into much higher value. Ensure that you leverage the technologies provided by your cloud provider to provide a broader platform for success, and select a provider that offers a truly sustainable cloud infrastructure.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud brings customers industry leading AL/ML, trusted security, an open approach, and an innovation culture. Customers can migrate their data, workloads, and applications to a flexible, modern cloud to operate more effectively, modernize for core business growth, and innovate to drive new business models and revenue streams.