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Can SAP Labs’ AI plan accelerate cloud migration?

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Can SAP Labs’ AI plan accelerate cloud migration?

Nestled in the sun-kissed hills of Provence, just north of Cannes and Antibes, is Sophia Antipolis, a renowned technology and science hub that is home to SAP subsidiary SAP Labs France. There are worse places to work. Surrounded by Aleppo pines and the odd palm, this modern building has been chosen to host the company’s first ever dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) customer experience centre. According to SAP, this is to enable customers to “discover and experiment with AI”, but it has to be so much more than that.

In many respects, generative AI (GenAI) has delivered an opportunity to all enterprise software suppliers. It’s a momentary levelling of the playing field, and this is where SAP believes it can use the labs to grow its position, both with existing customers and into new markets through its partners. What this means in terms of accelerating migration to S/4Hana remains to be seen, but there is certainly an expectation at SAP that its push to embed AI within its portfolio will prove a boon for the business.

Getting customers to migrate to the cloud is key to SAP’s strategy because business AI is at the centre of its product roadmap, at least according to Jesper Schleimann, who was recently promoted to head of SAP business artificial intelligence for EMEA. No cloud, no AI. And that’s as big a carrot as SAP can dangle for any wavering on-premise users wondering whether they should migrate to the cloud.

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Complexity challenges of pandemic hangover could lead to SaaS hysteria

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Complexity challenges of pandemic hangover could lead to SaaS hysteria

“I give the customer what he wants. I don’t think it’s my place to offer dietary advice. If they want red meat and boiling tar… then buon appetito,” said Tom Wambsgans, Shiv Roy’s husband and head of one of Waystar Royco’s divisions, in hit TV drama Succession.

This idea of feeding customers what they think they want regardless of the consequences is not necessarily a new one. While Wambsgans hit the nail on the head with Waystar Royco’s approach to customers, how many IT leaders can look at their mix of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, platforms and IT services and not feel that, somewhere along the line, they’ve been oversold?

This sums up nicely the almost Wild West approach of buying IT during the pandemic, when SaaS, for obvious reasons, had something of a growth spurt. The problem for many of these organisations is that data, which is needed for the efficient running of SaaS applications, resides in different enterprise systems. Often, the only way to overcome this is to buy a new SaaS product designed specifically to plug data gaps between enterprise systems with no application programming interfaces (APIs) in place. And so it goes on.

According to a NetApp’s 2023 cloud complexity report, released in March, 98% of senior IT leaders have been affected by increasing cloud complexity in some capacity, potentially leading to poor IT performance, loss in revenue and barriers to business growth.

In its recent report, Innovate or Fade, Accenture talked about the current “technology deficit”, which refers to “the disparity in adoption, implementation or effective use of technology (both established and leading edge) to create business value”.

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Tim Jones, chief exec: FCDO digital transformation: one down, four to go

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Tim Jones, chief exec: FCDO digital transformation: one down, four to go

Only last March, the minister for the Cabinet Office Jeremy Quin talked up the shared services strategy on its two-year anniversary claiming it could, hypothetically at least, save around £1.8bn over the next 15 years. Through five clusters, the project aims to bring 17 central government departments running unconnected ERP, HR and finance systems under one SaaS roof.

This plan to modernize government back-office systems and find efficiencies is obviously ambitious with long-lead deadlines. But two years on, the government may actually have something to shout about. One of the departmental clusters has successfully completed its “go live” phase and unified its HR and finance operations on Oracle Fusion.

One of the five clusters in the shared services strategy, the Overseas cluster primarily consists of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), a body formed in 2020 through the merger of the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development (DFID). However, as Tim Jones, the interim director general for finance and corporate at the FCDO points out, the cluster is so much more than that.

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Reputation on the line? Tech redundancies & jostling for future business

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Reputation on the line? Tech redundancies & jostling for future business

“These are the kinds of hard choices we have made throughout our 47-year history to remain a consequential company in this industry that is unforgiving to anyone who doesn’t adapt to platform shifts,” wrote Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO in a recent blog explaining why the company was cutting around 10,000 jobs in the coming months.

Microsoft, which claims that 2022 was a record year financially, is one of many tech firms that have committed to redundancies. Some are more eye-catching than others. For example, fast-growing payments firm Stripe announced at the end of last year that it was cutting 14 percent of its workforce, blaming over-hiring. Salesforce, the poster child for the SaaS industry, is cutting around 10 percent of its employees, with CEO Marc Benioff claiming, “as our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”

The numbers are stacking up, but as tech redundancy tracking site Layoffs.fyi shows, this is not just about the Big Tech players. The site claims that already this year, 122 tech businesses have laid off over 37,000 employees. While over-hiring during the pandemic may be one reason for cutting headcount, the breadth of the layoffs suggests something more seismic.

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The UK government wants to reload the Matrix. But is there a glitch?

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The UK government wants to reload the Matrix. But is there a glitch?

To borrow a line from the Matrix everyone knows (you know, the Keanu Reeves classic), “choice, the problem is choice.” According to the architects of the shared services cluster strategy for the UK government, this also applies to the civil service and its lack of interoperability. It’s a problem for which the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) thinks it has a solution for, going by the name of the Matrix.

Speaking to a Public Accounts Committee in January this year about the proposed clusters, specifically the Matrix one, Nathan Moores, the shared services strategy director at the Cabinet Office, said that “departments have traditionally had their own view on how they would like to do HR, finance and commercial, so the big step change is to get the departments to work as clusters.”

Moores is going to have his work cut out. Eight central government departments running unconnected ERP, HR and finance systems will hope to be brought under one SaaS roof. These departments range across HM Treasury, the Department for Education, BEIS and more. Half are already using Cloud technology; half aren’t.

As Moores embarks on what is called in the tender “a bundled procurement” for back-office IT services for Matrix, anyone could be forgiven if they are experiencing a moment of déjà vu. Government IT projects have poor form. As a National Audit Office (NAO) report on 25 years of government IT projects revealed a couple of years ago, “there is a gap between what government intends to achieve and what it delivers to citizens and service users, which wastes taxpayers’ money and delays improvements in public services.”

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