SAP Innovation Forum was again a truly interesting and busy intersection where hundreds of SAP-minded people flocked from one key-note presentation to another, networked with ecosystem partners and spent a whole day with their eyes peeled and ears curled towards the latest news about SAP.
To warm up for the event Mika Tanner asked:“Have you been diagnosed? What are you symptoms? Some digital-sclerosis, progressive customer experience palsy, opportunity-myopia or just a mild case of technical-hiccups?”
Cocktails, customers & competitiveness
This year was particularly interesting: the market is quickly defrosting and we wanted update ourselves on what are the true focus areas of the decision makers.
Our steamy crew had numerous discussions with event visitors and it was reassuring to hear that the investment atmosphere is improving steadily. Especially in our focus areas of customer engagement & insight, commerce, data analysis & architecture and various sophisticated business application areas there is an accelerating need for modern solutions.
AP’s role and competitiveness in the rapidly evolving business technology landscape generated some discussion. Customers have invested heavily in SAP’s technology and are duly concerned whether the next generation of solutions and future application architecture can capitalize on their current landscapes.
Time for small analysis: CDO vs SAP Innovation Forum attendee
In order to compare results of our recent CDO Barometer we collected a new batch of intel from the attendees and the comparison was indeed interesting. The SAP Innovation Forum audience was expected to be more IT-driven than the CDOs and hence we expected there would be some deviation in focus areas.
CDOs seem to have a more business-driven attention and pay attention especially to Customer Experience and somewhat to Commercializing Data and APIs, Platform Economy and IoT. Forum participants ranked Customer Experience relatively low in order of interest and selected instead a more tech-savvy menu of items like Machine Learning, AR, Robotics, 3D printing and IoT. Commercializing Data and APIs and Platform Economy were equally interesting, which is not surprising.
All in all, the 2017 SAP Innovation Forum was an excellent event and our Steampunk Crew have now changed costume and are continuing from where they left off with the customers and prospects.
See you next year!
Bilot’s Steam Punk Crew recommends:
- Mika Tanner: Have you been diagnosed?
- SAP Innovation Forum 2017: Social Media summary
- CDO Barometer 2017 Report (English)
- CDO Barometer 2017 Report (Finnish)
