3 takeaways from SAP Sapphire Orlando 2024
During my almost 25-year tenure as an SAP employee, I attended over 20 SAP Sapphire events. This June’s SAP Sapphire 2024 in-person event in Orlando, Florida, was a unique experience, as I was there for the first time as part of an SAP partner team.
Redwood Software was a gold sponsor of this year’s events in Orlando and Barcelona and a 2024 Pinnacle Award winner. I witnessed a new level of enthusiasm from SAP customers to learn how to extend and optimize their investments in SAP with an established partner solution like Redwood.
We had many great conversations at our booth about a range of topics:
- What’s new in the world of workload automation (WLA) and job scheduling
- How to optimize SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP BTP with end-to-end automation
- How automation can help you close your books faster
We also conducted plenty of RunMyJobs by Redwood demos on the show floor, and some attendees set up future meetings with key Redwood executives to find out how to ensure WLA is part of their RISE with SAP digital transformation and journey to cloud.
From these conversations and intriguing keynote presentations from SAP CEO Christian Klein, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and others, I came away with three consistent learnings across my interactions with SAP leaders, customers and other partners.
1. Clean core is the de facto standard of SAP strategies.
SAP is advising all customers and partners that any approach to new implementations, existing system maintenance or further enhancement and optimization of an SAP investment must rely on a clean core strategy. This is the only way to effectively leverage SAP’s technology innovations.
Furthermore, using SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is the only viable way to extend and customize your SAP ERP investment to keep a clean core. If you’re integrating, extending or enhancing SAP technologies and processes without using SAP BTP, you should stop and ask yourself: Why? SAP BTP is the most efficient and feasible way to do all of the above — and it safeguards a clean core approach.
2. Moving your SAP ERP to the cloud is not optional.
Transitioning your SAP environment to the cloud isn’t a debatable decision anymore. SAP sees this as much more than a technical upgrade. In fact, it’s the only reasonable way to continue adopting new innovations and upgrading existing systems across SAP and non-SAP solutions.
If you aren’t already in the cloud, in the process of moving over or planning to do so soon, you’re merely incurring technical debt and will be left in the proverbial dust by your industry peers.
3. SAP partner solutions are driving the next wave of innovation.
Perhaps the most surprising and compelling theme was SAP leaders’ evident recognition of partner solutions and innovations as the keys to advancement. Discussions about partners’ impact focused on AI and extending the ERP environment to make the most out of your SAP investments.
SAP sees its install base as the world’s largest repository of business information. Going forward, partner use cases and innovations will unlock the potential of that data to optimize and enhance business processes and decisions for all SAP users.
This will be particularly true as advanced automation and new AI use cases come to market. While ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies are at the forefront, producing new content such as text, images, music and even code, SAP’s leaders believe it’s leading the charge in the realm of “business AI.” They define the concept as solving business problems and improving operational efficiency in various functions like finance, supply chain, customer service, HR, etc.
SAP partner solutions and innovations will drive the next wave of business AI use cases and customer adoption of SAP systems. New AI scenarios will only be as good as the reliability and timeliness of the data pipelines feeding their large language models. RunMyJobs supports these efforts by autonomously securing and executing those pipelines so future SAP AI use cases contribute to the business outcomes customers intend.
Lessons from a customer session: Jabil
In addition to interacting with attendees at our booth, we had the opportunity to invite a Redwood customer to present in a theater session. Brian Silvestro, Senior IT Manager at global manufacturing company Jabil, highlighted the power of automation to maximize returns on your SAP investment.
In the session, Brian covered how automation and job scheduling has been essential to ensuring continuous operations before and after migrating to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. He explained that Jabil’s IT team feels prepared to effectively incorporate the next wave of innovation into their ERP.
Couldn’t attend SAP Sapphire? You can still engage with us to learn why RunMyJobs is SAP’s #1 job scheduler. Read our guide to future-proofing your SAP ecosystem.
About The Author
Neil Krefsky
With over 30 years of experience in product marketing, pre-sales, and business consulting, Neil is a seasoned leader in the tech industry, with a unique combination of subject matter expertise in enterprise automation, financial applications, cybersecurity applications, GenAI, SaaS, ERP systems, contact center solutions, customer experience enhancement, analytics, machine learning, and sustainability.
