UKISUG Connect is over for another year – another well-organised event with lots of interesting topics discussed concerning the world of SAP (as well as a lot of free pens!)
The Power of the Freebie
Quick Quiz: Which stand is giving away free prizes and which one isn’t?
I’m a sucker for a freebie as much as the next bloke, and if you do too, then UKSUG is definitely the place for you.
Ok, so giveaways are always a nice thing to pick up at a trade show if you’re lucky enough to have your name pulled out of the hat, but there’s clearly more to UKISUG Connect than swag.
Throughout the 3 days at the ICC plenty of visitors came to talk to us, resulting in some really interesting conversations around Digital Transformation, Big Data, and everything to do with Agile and DevOps.
For everyone we spoke to, regardless of the size of their organization, becoming a ‘digital business’ was evidently a key objective, but it seems the majority of people want more than buzz words.
That’s probably no surprise, but it did seem that visitors really were looking for practical help and solutions that could support their digital initiatives and meet their IT requirements.
Some of the recurring problems I heard time and again were:
How do we adapt our SAP landscape in order to support our business’s Digital Transformation?
How do we speed up our SAP processes in order deliver change faster so that the business is supported in the way that it needs to be?
Where are the practical solutions that can help us to actually make some changes
The interest in questions like this was reflected in the turnout for the presentation by our DevOps expert, James Roberts, on “How to implement Agile and DevOps to transform SAP delivery processes”, which addressed these key pain points for a crowd of eager SAP users.
It’s clear that over the past 12 months more and more people have begun to appreciate the benefits that Agile and DevOps can deliver and, judging by the fact that we ran out of time for the Q&A section, there’s no shortage of companies trying to understand how they can make these approaches work for their SAP systems. Naturally, we’re only too happy to help.
By the way, if you were at the show and missed James’ speech, don’t worry. There’s plenty of other information on our site and we’ll be hosting a webinar next month where we’ll dive into how you can support the successful adoption of DevOps for SAP.
S/4 is the future
If you didn’t manage to make it to the conference, the most obvious key message coming from SAP’s leadership team this year was that S/4HANA, if it is not already, should be at the forefront of your business strategy.
By 2025 SAP is planning on having all its customers running S/4HANA, meaning that your old legacy ECC system will be at risk of becoming obsolete (or at least unsupported).
However, an interesting statistic to take away from the key-note was that while 5% of SAP customers are using S/4HANA and 34% are planning to do so, fully 12% are unaware of platform! Meanwhile, 70% of organizations in the user group said SAP has been unclear in communicating the value of S/4HANA[PY1] to their organization.
Uncertainty about the journey to SAP S/4HANA leads many customers to fear a lengthy, expensive project that will disrupt operations – a fear that was clearly evident amongst the majority of attendees that we spoke to at this years’ leading SAP conference.
It remains to be seen just how the S/4HANA question will pan out over the next couple of years but luckily here at Basis Technologies we have a suite of tools that can help all different types of businesses, whether they’re adopting S/4HANA or aren’t ready to go off-premise quite yet.
If you want to see how we can support this, then get in touch with us and we can talk you through how we can help.
To all those who came to the booth and had a chat with us, it was great to catch up and understand your needs and hope you enjoyed the lifetime supply of Lindt!
Until 2017, it’s over and out and a big thanks to UKISUG for another great event!
