Recap SAPPHIRE NOW keynotes 2015

With all new things happening in the SAP world, like S/4HANA and IoT, I wish I could have made it to Orlando for SAPPHIRE NOW this week. But luckily SAP shares a lot online, including the full replay of the keynotes.

Bill McDermott



Key statement is about Run Simple, of course ;-)

“When businesses run simple you make life run simple, see businesses as intelligent seamless bodies – now that is beautiful, almost as beautiful as life itself”

With such powerful statements I personally feel looking at one of America’s next presidents ;-)
SAP has a vision and McDermott explained that well in his keynote. Kept it within an hour – hey that’s new. And perfectly added customer stories to his talk.

  • 12:00 – Under Armor, know who your customer is, what he wants. Anticipate where the ball is going to be, not where it is
  • 17:20 – Enel, utility company that creates value for all electronic devices, not just providing electricity
  • 27:50 – Sports in general and SAP’s plans in that sector
  • 33:35 – Facebook to join forces with SAP to make the world more open and connected. Change the way how businesses and people interact
  • 40:00 – Google on how Google Docs have been integrated into S/4HANA
  • 51:00 – Port of Hamburg on how to grow business without scaling up the location by using IoT

Key messages:
  • Data is the foundation for every enterprise
  • Digitize your platform and core operations
  • Connect to business networks
Make use of the HANA platform and combine the transactional and the analytical worlds. Combine structured and unstructured data. Stop thinking in silos, use your operational data, interpret, learn, simulate and predict. Real time!


Bernd Leukert / Steve Singh


Leukert’s SAPPHIRE NOW keynote performance was way better than with the introduction of S/4HANA at the New York stock exchange. That was more a technical show than explaining the business value. The S/4HANA demo at 12:18 now shows the system running in the cloud with simple Finance and Logistics combined. You can manage by exception as S/4 offers you decision support, profitability and customer performance on one page.

S/4HANA is:
  • Designed for data driven business
  • Ask your own questions, not only the predefined ones
  • Use prediction and simulation for decision support

SAP also made a bold statement with stating that a non disruptive migration to S/4HANA is possible. The core data model is the same. But with reducing complexity and deleting redundant tables, we need to see how his works out in practice. Leukert explained at 26:42 on how to get into S/4HANA:
  1. Migrate to HANA
  2. Upgrade to S/4HANA
  3. Choose your deployment option: cloud or stay on premise

A ‘small’ request to existing customers, demodify your system, eliminate modifications, get back to standard SAP. Sure, everyone understands, but in practice this will be a huge task for customers that have heavily invested in custom developments in order to make SAP work for their business.


IoT, Internet of Things is hot, also in the SAP world. With SAP’s HANA Cloud Platform and IoT services SAP is ready to step into this world:
  • Provide connectivity to sensors
  • Store and process the collected data
  • Use analytics to get insight
  • And connect to your business processes, close the loop

The Siemens story at 42:20 is a great example of IoT in the real world.

And for the gadget lovers, you have to look at the Texan utility demo at 50:00. Transform analytics and insight into action, real time and see how notifications appear on your Apple Watch.

Coming next to the HANA platform:
  • Combine Hadoop with HANA
  • Use Spark as distribution engine

Best part of the keynote is the Walmart customer story at 57:55. Learn why Walmart, worlds biggest retailer, stepped into HANA. How they support their 2.2 million colleagues with an HR system and how trillions of records are processed in their Finance system. Walmart is a data driven retailer where all the information is used to serve and focus on the customer and always keep the price low. That applies to every single aspect of the process chain.

Some figures:
  • S/4HANA now has 400 customers
  • SAPHCP has 1400 customers
  • 140 partners working with SAPHCP
  • 70.000 developers on SAPHCP
  • Reduce TCO with 30% with running your ERP system in the cloud

Key messages:
  • Spend less time on non valuable tasks, introduce the 4th generation core: S/4HANA
  • Embrace the digital economy, reimagine your business model
  • Leverage the power of business networks, connect to the world

And to close with Steve Singh’s statement at 1:35:33


“Folks, it’s time to connect, it’s time to run simple!”

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