SAP Looks to Simplify IT

SAP wants to not only make using its applications a whole lot simpler, but also doing business with SAP or any other company, for that matter.

At the Sapphire Now 2014 conference today, newly installed SAP CEO Bill McDermott said that SAP is now committed to not only giving customers access to data visualization and user interface development tools such as Fiori for free, but also reducing the complexity of doing business with SAP.

To that latter end, SAP is working toward streamlining its product lines, pricing and customer support processes in a way that will make them simpler to navigate. At the same time, SAP says that the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform also makes it possible to simplify and reduce the amount of code per application by eliminating, for example, the need for much of the data aggregate processing within any given application. In fact, SAP says the elimination of those processes serves to increase throughput by several orders of magnitude per application.

At Sapphire, SAP also launched today SAP Simple Finance, a financial application running on the SAP cloud that is designed to make financial information easily available to business executives both inside and out of the finance department. In addition, SAP is providing new customers with access to the Ariba supplier network for free for 30 days.

Finally, SAP also announced the formation of a dedicated cloud organization that will work within 25 vertical industries to develop applications that will run on the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud managed by SAP.

As part of its new-found focus on simplicity, McDermott says that SAP is committed to not only building applications that IT organizations deploy and manage, but also cloud services that line of business executives and even consumers will use.

McDermott says what is driving all this passion for simplification is nothing less than the biggest economic opportunity in the history of mankind: an emerging New Economy where consumers and companies have formed digital relationships that will generate $60 trillion in economic growth by 2020.

To make that happen, McDermott says SAP and other vendors inside and out of IT need to make the customer experience much simpler by making way on business processes and systems that today are overly complex.

Given the fact that McDermott notes that the average company is running 50 applications per $1 billion of revenue, IT is naturally an excellent place to start reducing all that complexity in a way that should enable businesses to generate a lot more value per every application dollar spent.