SAP Holds Regional SAP BTP Executive Summits

⇨ SAP recently conducted two executive summits focused on SAP BTP

⇨ Customers were invited to hear about the ways other organizations are leveraging SAP BTP

⇨ SAP BTP will be a central aspect of future conversations with SAP about data, analytics, application development, integration, and AI

SAP recently extended opportunities to potential SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) customers to hear success stories directly from customers at two SAP BTP Executive Summits in September. The summits, held at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California, and The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, each had eight different customer sessions split across two tracks and also provided an opportunities to meet SAP executives or attend roundtables at an SAP office on the second day. SAPinsider attended the east event at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

While both events started with an introduction by an SAP executive, the Philadelphia event was addressed by newly appointed Chief Operating Officer for SAP North America, Carmen Krueger, speaking on innovation, why it is crucial for organizations who want to be future-ready, and her own personal and professional experiences of innovation.

While Krueger kicked off the event, the keynote was presented by Jonathan Brill, HP Global Futurist and the author of Rogue Waves. While not directly focused on SAP BTP, Brill’s keynote was about future-proofing an organization and adapting, surviving, and thriving during change. Brill citied customer stories where he played an advisory role, especially from his work with HP in 2019, and anecdotes from his personal life.

Brill asserted that although events like the recent global covid pandemic are like unpredictable rogue waves, organizations must be prepared for such events. He said that while it is easy to improve performance during calm periods, modern business practices can put companies at risk during times of significant change. The strategy needed to address this is building resilience, which is about the capability to adjust quickly to rapidly changing situations.

Brill advocates an ABC approach – Awareness, Behavior Change, and Culture Change – to build resilience. Awareness is about knowing where and when radical change is likely to occur. It is about recognizing that potential issues exist and having plans to act with resiliency. Behavior Change is about maximizing resilience when change does occur, while Culture Change is about amplifying the quality and speed of experimentation in teams.

While not directly connected to SAP BTP, the thought aligns with SAP’s messaging on the offering. SAP wants customers to use SAP BTP to build a platform to create a resilient organization. This can be done by having greater awareness of activities using services like SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, changing behaviors regarding ERP customization and focusing on extensibility using the ABAP environment or SAP Build, or culture change that leverages developing AI capabilities or SAP Data Intelligence.

In the Philadelphia event, the customer speakers included Messer, Pfizer, Langan, Viatris, CommScope, Coty, PVH Corporation, and Florida Crystals. All the customer sessions included a partner who spoke about their roles in the project implementation. While for some this was only a part of the process, for other customers the partners played a significant role in the project’s success. Some of the success stories the customers were briefed about will be explored in future articles, along with experiences of roundtable sessions.

Day 1 of the event ended with two keynotes. In the first, Eric Schneider, SVP and Software Engineer for the NHL, and Brad Larsen, former Head Coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets, spoke about how the NHL is working with SAP to provide additional insights into both player performance  and with the venues that hockey games occur in. This included NHL Venue Metrics that runs on SAP BTP.

The second was a conversation with Patrick Dineen, CIO of Nielsen Media, who talked about the challenges that Nielsen faces today with the rapidly changing way media is consumed and how they are working to provide viewing metrics to these new markets using capabilities from SAP.

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

SAP BTP is a huge part of SAP‘s cloud strategy and RISE with SAP. SAP Build is now a separate part of RISE with SAP and an SAP BTP service, in addition to the SAP BTP consumption credits that are also part of the offering. But SAP BTP is not just about RISE with SAP. For example, one of the customers who presented at the event leveraged SAP BTP but is not using SAP S/4HANA at all as they had recently completed an 11-year-long SAP ECC rollout, while another is using SAP Datasphere as the central part of their daily operations. Although both these customers are using SAP ERP system, SAP BTP is a separate but significant part of their daily activities.

For organizations that are running SAP offerings, SAP BTP will be a central part of the conversation regarding application development, extensibility, data storage, data connectivity, integration, and new AI and machine learning capabilities. In the future, it will be impossible to look at any of these capabilities without engaging in a conversation around SAP BTP.