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Success for SAP's Industry Cloud Relies on Partners
At the height of pandemic lockdowns in June 2020, SAP unveiled its industry cloud effort. We presented a vision of freedom and cooperation during a time of crisis and restriction. We discussed a “open yet integrated innovation space for SAP, partners, and customers,” one that would enable programmers to create custom cloud-based applications that could access SAP’s fundamental process and data domains via open APIs. The goal was to free up both major and small creative partners from needing to enter the intelligent suite’s engine room in order to produce sector-specific solutions above the waterline.
It is now evident, over three years later, that SAP’s industry cloud was a concept whose time had come. It is demonstrating to be a powerful and expansive enabling technology that has carved out more than simply a niche. Industry cloud is proven to be a unique ecology for innovation that has already spawned hundreds of original answers to a variety of business issues. Industry cloud is also causing significant change at SAP, its partners, and its customers as a result of our collaborative adoption of what has proven to be a very potent concept.
The figures tell a compelling story: what began with a small number of partners in four industries now includes close to 300 software partner solutions across 20 industries, with another 150 in the works. Furthermore, our top worldwide strategic service partners alone have committed somewhere about US$150 million to cloud services for industry. And there are no signs of a slowdown in the momentum.
Industry Focus
The success of our customers will depend on a cloud-based combination of core processes and a dynamic, expanding portfolio of industry-specific solutions. To support the rapid innovation they need to take advantage of new business opportunities, our clients are rightfully expecting speed, modularity, and flexibility, and they recognise that cloud-based ecosystems are the means to that end. According to a recent IDC prediction, companies using industry ecosystems like SAP’s industry cloud will innovate 40% more quickly than those using more conventional methods.
While SAP is creating a number of its own industry cloud solutions, we think partners that are deeply rooted in their respective sectors will ultimately be responsible for a sizable portion of the industry cloud product line.
Customers First
According to our experience thus far, clients enjoy industry cloud for many of the same reasons that our partners do, namely the speed and ease of development and integration and the SAP partners’ ability to fill in any gaps in the market’s existing solutions. However, other clients see the industrial cloud innovation layer as a kind of sandbox where they may create their own solutions and, in some circumstances, productize them for their own industries. Customers have been partners in the development of SAP software for a while, but the industry cloud is accelerating that dynamic.
SAP’s industry cloud proves that good things happen if you provide a setting in which intelligent, imaginative, and ambitious people and organizations with challenges to solve can function with cutting-edge technologies and ample freedom. The industrial cloud project is currently gaining steam, and that is how it is manifesting. Although there have been some unexpected features of our, our partners’, and our customers’ overall success with industry cloud, this was an idea whose time had definitely come.
News Source : SAP News
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