CXO Standpoint
SAP Cloud Platform and the Future
of Development for SAP
or a long time, many businesses viewed their IT
departments as an overhead expense which kept
the business running but didn’t add a lot of value
to the bottom line. In recent years, this line of thinking
has changed dramatically as there have been so many
notable examples where technology innovations have
completely disrupted a particular industry. This change in
philosophy has caused companies to make commitments
towards achieving digital transformation like never
before. F become an SAP shop and that decision strongly influenced
the software purchasing habits of the business. Here, if a
business need arose, the company would look to SAP to
provide the solution they were looking for. If the solution
was a perfect match, that’s great, but even if not, there were
still advantages from an IT perspective to sticking with one
vendor in terms of cohesiveness, tight integration, and
familiarity. On the business side of these transactions
however, these kinds of choices were oftentimes not very
well-received.
While such developments are exciting, this shift in
philosophy has placed even more pressure on enterprise
IT departments to deliver solutions in a fast and efficient
way. While this is certainly a daunting task, the good
news for SAP shops is that help is already here in the
form of the SAP Cloud Platform. The remaining
challenge is to figure out how to embrace this technology
to achieve continuous integration going forward. While a best-of-breeds approach may not be ideal from an
IT perspective, individual departments want the solution
that best matches their requirements. And now, with the
advent of the cloud and a proliferation of SaaS offerings in
the marketplace, these departments now have the freedom
to purchase packaged software solutions without having to
go through the IT department. Regardless of the
circumstances, suffice it to say that the days of the
monolithic landscape are numbered – even for companies
that swear they’ll never take their ERP systems to the cloud.
Moving Towards Hybrid Landscapes
One of the bigger challenges IT departments face today is
that the enterprise landscape is becoming increasingly
fragmented. In the old days, a company might decide to
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As the dust begins to settle on all these developments,
enterprise IT departments are finding themselves left to
JULY 2017 |