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SAP enhances business technology software for ease of use

Changes support supply chain management, resiliency during pandemic conditions, firm says.

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Ben Ames
By Ben AmesJun 18, 2020
Ben Ames
Ben Ames has spent 20 years as a journalist since starting out as a daily newspaper reporter in Pennsylvania in 1995. From 1999 forward, he has focused on business and technology reporting for a number of trade journals, beginning when he joined Design News and Modern Materials Handling magazines. Ames is author of the trail guide "Hiking Massachusetts" and is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism.
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German software giant SAP AG today unveiled upgrades to its enterprise software capabilities that it says will help companies more easily transform their data into business value.

The enhancements and unification of SAP’s Business Technology Platform enable both developers and business users to access integrated, end-to-end services and tools to realize value along three critical areas of IT: data excellence, process integration, and extension, the company said during its Sapphire Now conference, being held virtually this year because of coronavirus restrictions.

"Many customers I have spoken with have expressed the need for agility and quick time-to-value, made even more urgent by the Covid-19 pandemic,” SAP CTO and Executive Board Member Juergen Mueller said in a release. “To achieve both, technology becomes even more important, and SAP can help meet those challenges. We’ve added significant enhancements to every major component of our Business Technology Platform to help customers across all industries overcome obstacles stemming from ubiquity of data, complexity of IT and business volatility.”

Specifically, the new capabilities in the firm’s Business Technology Platform include features and partnerships associated with SAP HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud.

SAP said its HANA database now offers business layer functionality, allowing analysts and users to participate directly, instead of relying on data warehouse IT experts, according to Daniel Lahl, vice president for product marketing with SAP. In a further step toward making those functions more available, the product is now available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, as well as Microsoft’s Azure. 

In another change, the SAP Analytics Cloud, known as SAC, has added predictive analytics features. And in order to tie together those enhanced applications, SAP is now offering a new set of integration functionalities, providing ease of use that allows customers to use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) product either from SAP itself or from diverse providers including Salesforce and Oracle, he said.

Together, the upgrades support improved supply chain management practices by encouraging digital operations, allowing greater resiliency, and applying Industry 4.0, the company says. “This is huge for logistics as things crank back up again [in global economic markets],” Lahl said. “Ports will really have to rethink some of the ways they do things because of new go-forward rules.”

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