SAP: PHL companies must embrace new digital solutions to ensure growth

LOCAL businesses are assured of their growth in this era of digitization had they keep on adopting emerging technologies designed to surpass client experience, said a top executive of an enterprise application software provider.

“For Philippine businesses to secure growth and maintain high-quality performance in the digital landscape, they must continuously integrate new solutions into their current systems to ensure that they exceed customer expectations,” said Edler Panlilio, managing director of SAP Philippines. 

He noted, in particular, new data management tools, product road maps, and updates to SAP HANA, as well as other applications that were announced during this year’s “SAPPHIRE NOW” event.

“[They] can be utilized by all types of businesses in the Philippines regardless of size, especially that they present next-gen [next-generation] capabilities to support them to achieve their desired outcomes, and make the world run better,” he said.  

The three-day event held in the United States early this month featured the 10 latest offerings of Qualtrics solutions aimed at improving experience management (XM)—a critical factor for business growth and positive breakthroughs. These enhance the way organizations engage with consumers by using the experience data (X-data) and operational data (O-data) and, embedding them into existing CRM, ERP, and HCM systems, as well as to the SAP C/4HANA suite.

Doing so, with guidance of data collected, enables them to gain insights from the values, intention, and emotions of employees, customers, partners, and stakeholders. Entities can then formulate strategies based on these trends to improve customer and employee relationships, along with the quality of product and brand.

For businesses to outgrow competition and at the same time, deliver unique customer experience through seamless data processes, they can leverage on the new SAP HANA Cloud Services and SAP Cloud Platform.

The former serves as a single gateway to data of any size to address the challenges of distributed data landscapes. Combining its in-memory technology with data virtualization leads to simplicity for data consumers and flexibility for data management. 

A data lake storage tier aids businesses to expand their data managed by SAP HANA sans limits. On-premise customers can reap more benefits from the new cloud services as they can flexibly add capacity as needed.

SAP Cloud Platform is evolving more into a business technology platform, assisting customers to easily extend and integrate SAP applications with various capabilities. SAP and partners alike enrich the platform by contributing and scaling their business expertise.

Organizations likewise stand to benefit from the company’s project called “Embrace,” a collaboration program with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud as well as global strategic service partners (GSSPs). 

This initiative puts the customer’s move to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud in the language and context of their primary industry, by recommending the platform, software, services and infrastructure from SAP, as well as their preferred hyperscaler and chosen service partner.

Their digital shift is planned to come in the form of market-approved journeys, reference architectures and easy access to the underpinning technology services needed to help customers achieve the best business outcomes. Such collaborative effort of SAP seeks to provide its customers a single blueprint to support their transition and journey toward an intelligent enterprise.

Another welcome development for companies going digital is the announcement of its tie-up with the giant Apple to expand its app services to iOS and Mac. Under this partnership, Apple’s on-device machine learning (ML) technology, CORE ML, will be available for the first time as part of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for its very own operating system. 

The latest version of the Cloud channel of SAP allows businesses to create custom, intelligent iOS apps powered by SAP Leonardo. ML models automatically will download to iPhone and iPad so apps can run offline, and then dynamically update while connected to SAP Cloud Platform.

The partnership has paved the way for SAP to rebuild its most popular mobile apps for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions, along with SAP Asset Manager, to run natively on iOS. They are fully integrated with iPhone and iPad, to optimize security, performance and the latest platform innovations from Apple. Roderick L. Abad

SAP’s collaboration with the multinational technology firm does not end here as it plans to expand its native iOS experience across its broader applications portfolio, starting with SAP Ariba solutions.

The leading enterprise application software company helps organizations of all sizes and in all industries run at their best. In fact, 77 percent of the world’s transaction revenue touches on its system. 

The firm’s end-to-end suite of applications and services enables more than 437,000 business and public customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. 

In the Philippines, SAP makes the digital transformation journeys of the country’s top innovating companies, including JG Summit Holdings Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc., to name a few.