A note from 2026: This article was published in 2019 and reflects SAP’s product names and roadmap at that time. Since then, SAP Cloud Platform has become SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud has been renamed SAP Datasphere, SAP Intelligent RPA capabilities have moved into SAP Build Process Automation, and SAP sold its majority stake in Qualtrics in 2023.

Rauf Aliev at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

Last week, the 30th annual SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference took place May 7–9 in sunny Orlando, FL. This year, it was three in one: SAPPHIRE NOW, the ASUG conference, and CX LIVE. All three brought no fewer than 30,000 attendees to Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center. More than 2,400 sessions were held during the three days, spread across more than 1.5 million square feet of exhibition space, meeting rooms, and halls. For those of you who didn’t make it to SAPPHIRE NOW and CX LIVE, I’ve pulled together the key takeaways from both.

In 2019, for the first time, SAP CX Live took place concurrently with the SAPPHIRE NOW/ASUG Annual Conference. The events were hosted in different corners of the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, the second-largest convention facility in the United States. It was a huge venue, but that was even better — it helped me hit my goal of 12k steps a day. However, after a number of 15-minute walks with a heavy backpack, I started thinking twice about whether I really wanted to go across the convention center to join sessions on the other end.

These conferences were completely different in terms of atmosphere and tempo. As usual, SAPPHIRE NOW was crowded, while CX LIVE was cozy and quiet.

Hundreds of exhibitors were segregated between the events based on their proximity to the Customer Experience topic. Everything related to the CX portfolio was grouped in the same location.

The event attracted 30,000 people onsite from 100 countries and over one million online. Even in the far corners of the city, you could see local bars with branded signs welcoming SAP’s guests.

Xs and Os

This year, the main leitmotif and throughline of the conference was the concept of X-data and O-data.

The “X” stands for Experience data and brings data on how someone feels and what the context is — the emotional component. The “O” stands for Operational data, such as costs, accounting, and sales.

“Experience is now the organizing principle of the global economy,” said Bill McDermott, SAP CEO, in his day-one keynote at SAPPHIRE NOW. “Every CEO I meet is trying to solve the experience gap… the difference between what people expect and what they actually receive. […] SAP was already the richest source of operational O-data, but we didn’t have experience X-data. The SAP must be the platform that combines X-data and O-data. X- plus O- [data] gives you the ability to deliver true personalization at mass scale so you can bridge the experience gap.”

Actually, this simple idea of bringing experience data and operational data together resonates with me. It is the right and timely message and strategy for SAP. Putting the customer at the center of any solution is not a new strategy, but it is a strong foundation for success.

SAP keynote slide about combining X-data and O-data

“We want everyone to remember their Xs and Os,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott in his inspirational keynote. “Experience Management is the new frontier for the world’s best-run businesses. I have never seen SAP more fired up to help our customers be a driving force for growth, innovation, and optimism.”

This move to a more user-focused approach is supported by SAP’s recent $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics, the company famous for its solutions for tracking consumer sentiment. It is the most important and far-reaching announcement.

SAP Qualtrics

Qualtrics, founded 17 years ago, started as a survey company. Today, it provides product research and customer surveys to more than 9,000 customers globally, including over 75% of the Fortune 100 companies. The acquisition became the largest VC-backed acquisition globally and the second-largest in SAP’s history (CBInsights).

With survey automation at its core, the company enriched its services with powerful analytics and visualization capabilities, as well as machine-learning techniques that automatically highlight key drivers and give recommendations. At its core, Qualtrics has a platform for building complex omnichannel surveys, integrating them into business processes, executing them when events occur, collecting results, analyzing feedback, generating insights and recommendations, and visualizing results in different forms to let analysts discover insights on their own based on data.

You can measure and collect NPS (Net Promoter Score) over time and, based on that, make predictions about customer behavior, such as whether customers are at risk of churn. The system can measure and track brand awareness, brand loyalty, and brand associations, and predict sales growth based on the collected data. Ad-testing tools help you validate advertising concepts and creative execution by testing them with a sample of the target audience.

SAP announced 10 new offerings that combine experience data (X-data) with operational data (O-data) to measure and improve the four core experiences of business — customer, employee, product, and brand.

The most interesting solutions for Hybrismart readers seem to be the following solutions from SAP and Qualtrics:

Among the other solutions announced, I’d highlight the following:

McDermott introduced the co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics, Ryan Smith. After the acquisition, Ryan will continue to run the company within SAP’s larger cloud business group. “We live in the experience economy where organizations are either intentionally racing to the top or unknowingly racing to the bottom,” said Ryan. “The difference between the companies that will win is they understand how X-data and O-data work together to tell the story of what is happening in an organization, why it’s happening and how to act in real time to deliver breakthrough business results.”

Ryan Smith and Bill McDermott on stage at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

SAP C/4HANA Foundation

SAP announced SAP C/4HANA Foundation, an orchestration layer that enables administrators and developers to flexibly use enterprise applications and extensions from SAP, observability and application-management tools, deeply understand customers’ businesses to offer individually customized products and services, provide a powerful extensibility framework, and, eventually, implement cloud solutions from SAP conveniently and quickly.

The C/4HANA Foundation product management group nominated three projects to be released in the first cycle of 2019:

For example, in the SAP C/4HANA cockpit (https://cockpit.cx.cloud.sap/), a part of C/4HANA Foundation available today, you can keep track of your entitlements, view implemented solutions and subscribed/purchased applications from the C/4HANA stack, and manage user authorizations. By the end of the month, SAP C/4HANA Foundation will be automatically deployed for 1,700+ SAP C/4HANA customers free of charge.

SAP C/4HANA Foundation is based on Kyma, an open-source project designed natively on Kubernetes. It is built natively on Google Cloud Platform. Over the next few months, SAP plans to extend its integration with other IaaS providers, as well as its own SAP Cloud Platform.

As a side note: Project Kyma is now freely available in the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace.

Useful links:

SAP HANA Cloud Services and Data Warehouse Cloud

SAP announced new SAP HANA Cloud Services, a single gateway for all enterprise data. The idea behind the system is to bring all SAP and non-SAP data together into a single logical data fabric that resides across distributed data environments. The goal is to provide one environment to manage data both on-premises and in the cloud.

SAP HANA Cloud Services presentation slide

This approach opens the HANA database for more widespread use. “SAP HANA is too good of a database just to lock it inside SAP enterprise applications,” SAP founder and chairman Hasso Plattner said during the keynote. “HANA is for everyone. Now, with SAP HANA Cloud Services, by making it low TCO, delivered as a service, virtually everyone can get started immediately with their SAP HANA journey,” added Gerrit Kazmaier, senior VP of SAP HANA and Analytics.

Hasso Plattner shared the latest numbers on SAP HANA:

SAP HANA adoption and scale figures from SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

As Kazmaier noted in his article, “With SAP HANA at the core, the new solution will be built on the fastest in-memory computing engine. By making this engine elastic, it will be possible to scale out indefinitely, enabling customers to add more resources as they require — and reduce them when they don’t need them anymore. Building on technologies such as SAP IQ, SAP HANA Cloud Services also will also offer an SQL data lake as a storage layer at minimum cost.”

SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is the first application planned to be built with HANA Cloud Services. It unites heterogeneous data in a single solution, maintaining security and trust.

Find out more about SAP Data Warehouse Cloud at http://www.sapdatawarehouse.cloud/

Useful links:

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (IRPA) is an automation suite where bots imitate humans by replacing mouse clicks, interpreting text-heavy communications, or making process suggestions to end users for definable and repeatable business processes. It helps automate recurring work and dramatically save costs and time. You can create a chatbot and train it to ask questions and process natural-language replies. The results can be posted by the bot automatically into an SAP system by filling out forms and entering the data collected by the bot from the interaction.

The solution is based on robotic process automation software from Contextor SAS, acquired by SAP at the end of 2018.

Find out more:

SAP Data Intelligence

SAP Data Intelligence is a comprehensive cloud solution to scale AI & ML across the enterprise. The product is used for coordination and cooperation between business users and their customers, data engineers, and data science teams. Using SAP Data Intelligence, customers will be able to manage their data, data scientists will be able to manage algorithms with machine-learning models, tools, and frameworks, and engineers will be able to manage deployments of AI & ML tools in the cloud.

The product also allows them to adopt the latest trends and technology by combining the SAP Data Hub solution — don’t confuse that with the data integration and staging platform with the same name — and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation in a single integrated cloud offering, making use of established open-source frameworks such as TensorFlow. With SAP Data Intelligence, users can connect, discover, and orchestrate SAP HANA and third-party data sources to automate data cleansing. SAP Data Intelligence is planned to be available in June 2019.

Read more:

Partnership with Apple

In summer 2017, Apple unveiled a new machine-learning framework API to make mobile AI faster, named Core ML. This technology covers everything from text analysis to face recognition, including all sorts of neural networks — deep, recurrent, and convolutional — as well as linear and tree models. Unlike SAP ML services, this technology is designed for on-device processing, meaning the data won’t leave phones and tablets.

Tim Cook presenting the Apple and SAP partnership at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

As announced at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS will use Core ML. Machine-learning models will automatically be copied to iPhone and iPad so the apps will be able to run offline. It will be available for the first time as part of SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. SAP reported that it has rebuilt some of the existing apps of the CX suite to run natively on iOS, use the latest platform innovations, and maximize security and performance.

“Apple is on the rise in the enterprise,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “Our customers love the unmatched security and ease of use iOS is known for, and that it gives them a superior platform to build game-changing business apps. We have a strong partnership, and today’s announcements show SAP’s commitment to continue our innovation with Apple.”

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, commented: “Enterprise customers are seeing real business benefits when they use iOS. We are excited for SAP to extend these experiences further on iPhone and iPad, as well as bringing them to the Mac for the first time. This is an important milestone for our partnership, and we are thrilled to be working together with SAP to empower our customers with the world’s most-trusted business process data on iPhone, iPad, and Mac — the best devices for business.” Cook explained how machine learning and augmented reality can be used by retailers to speed up in-store inventory management and streamline product maintenance. “When you’re looking for productivity, efficiency, and experience, machine learning and AR are key. Mobility is a must. We have to deliver the best information to the right individual at the right time to get the right business decision,” said Cook. “With SAP incorporating these into their SDK, what we can do is just limitless.”

Partnership with OpenText

OpenText Corporation is a leader in developing and selling enterprise information management software. With OpenText products, you can securely manage legal content or unstructured data from capture through archiving and disposition, and intelligently search and classify documents of multiple formats and sources with respect to security and privacy rules.

OpenText announced that its content services will be delivered through SAP Cloud Platform and other SAP solutions. The services will include document management, such as folder, file, and metadata management, versioning and viewing capabilities, attachment lists, Office 365 integration, capture, and document-generation services.

Virginia Backaitis from “Digitalizing Polaris,” in her column, quotes Hans-Gerd Schaal, vice president of strategic initiatives at OpenText: “The onboarding process of a new employee is one of the most document-intensive processes within HR. Using OpenText Core for SAP Success Factors we can simplify many of these processes. For example, to validate an employee’s authorization to work within a certain region or country, an employer using Success Factors with OpenText Core can send the new employee an email, with an embedded link, requesting the employee upload a copy of their valid work permit. The employee selects the link and through simple drag and drop, uploads the work permit to the HR business partner for review. The HR business partner will verify the validity of the document, add additional information such as permit expiration date and add the information directly to the employee’s digital personnel folder. This process is simple for the employee (drag and drop) and ensures required documents are tracked for validated for compliance purposes.”

Read more:

SAP Customer Data Platform

SAP announced that the company plans to evolve and complement SAP Customer Data Cloud, ex-Gigya, and SAP Marketing Cloud to deliver a full-scale, enterprise-grade customer data platform. This data-management solution will unify customer data from multiple sources, integrate, clean, and organize it in a central repository, and create a unified profile for the customer that can be used by different SAP and non-SAP applications to enable advanced customer-centric functionality such as personalization.

Project “Embrace”

It was announced that Microsoft will be the first global cloud provider to join Project Embrace, a collaboration program with public cloud providers and Global Strategic Service Partners (GSSPs). The goal of the program is to simplify and accelerate a customer’s journey from their current on-premise production landscapes to the cloud. Microsoft promises that the program will “help customers better manage refactoring and ongoing support costs, access the latest innovations, and improve the performance of SAP applications by leveraging Microsoft and SAP’s unified blueprint running S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure.” As the result of more than a year of preparation, the brands will deliver a joint roadmap and single blueprint with a specific integrated reference architecture to run SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure, market-approved journeys, and easy access to the underpinning technology services.

Find more:

Training Cloud for SAP Litmos

The company announced a training cloud for SAP Litmos, the latest addition to the CX portfolio. The solution comes with a built-in library of course content designed to master sales and customer service. SAP Litmos is a new brand for CallidusCloud’s learning management solution, which was acquired last year.

Start-ups

There was a huge exhibition area at SAPPHIRE NOW with a large number of service providers. Below, I will mention only some that are relevant to e-commerce and web development.

SAP Customer Experience Labs presented four prototype apps demonstrating possible applications for various cutting-edge technologies, such as blockchain and augmented reality. KOI is a prototype of a decentralized identity sign-on service based on the concept of a distributed ledger — blockchain. The prototype solution allows users to log in to any service provider using their smartphone as an authentication device. Another prototype based on a distributed ledger, Codename ANTWERP, “blockchainificates” the product-enrichment process to make data changes and transactions immutable, traceable, and transparent. Yo!AvatAR is a prototype demonstrating how merchants can offer shoppers a new kind of loyalty engagement based on augmented reality and gamification. Hands-Free Field Service Maintenance demonstrates how voice recognition and machine learning can be used with Service Cloud and other SAP products.

SAP Customer Experience Labs prototypes at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

In addition to its own products and services, SAP Customer Experience Labs presented six innovative non-SAP start-ups to demonstrate the solutions that complement and extend SAP CX offerings.

Constructor.io

Constructor.io. I had a wonderful talk with Eli Finkelshteyn, CEO of Constructor.io, a San Francisco-based start-up. Their offering uses AI & ML to increase the usability and efficiency of product search and make it personalized based on data such as customer behavior, product catalogs, product-related metadata, price changes, and purchases. What’s amazing to me is that the system, as Eli explained, uses their own search engine core. Unlike many others who build their solutions on top of traditional open-source products, with all their constraints and limitations. I can’t say whether it’s good or bad, but it is definitely a bold and promising move. A brand-new engine? I initially had some doubts about performance. In response, Eli shared the fact that Constructor.io is currently used on Jet.com, one of the most innovative e-stores, with a huge product set and traffic. Additionally, Constructor.io offers voice search and natural language processing. As a result, the solution seemed very interesting to me. So, if the stars align well, I will take a detailed look and publish a more thorough and critical review of the Constructor.io search engine here on the blog.

OTO.ai

This start-up presents technology to measure the emotion behind words and get a much better understanding of intent without performing resource-intensive voice-to-text transcription. For example, for contact centers, the insights can be used to provide immediate feedback to the customer agent or, when aggregated, to the manager for better customer service. This start-up received an investment from SAP’s early-stage fund, SAP.iO.

Rapitag

The next interesting start-up is Rapitag, a security tag that unlocks automatically once the payment goes through. In the store, customers can scan the product with their mobile phone and complete the payment process in the app. If the payment is successful, the shopper can easily remove the tag and leave the store without queueing at the checkout. The idea of involving mobile commerce in in-store purchases is very interesting. You can use personalization and gamification to make your customers even happier. Imagine that every customer can get a personalized price for a product scan. Or they can buy the next item within 24 hours and get a discount. They can share personal details — contacts and preferences — in one click and get a discount in return.

Rapitag smart security tag

Ruum for SAP

Ruum, one of the start-ups that grew out of SAP.iO Venture Studio, broke new ground today. This SaaS closes the gaps in C/4HANA products by adding collaboration and project-management capabilities.

ThreeKit

The solution from ThreeKit provides a way to embed realistic 3D images within a commerce platform, allowing buyers to rotate, flip, scale, and look at a product from different angles. Unlike numerous other 3D visualization services, ThreeKit allows you to render realistic 3D representations of complex products that don’t even exist yet. For example, a kitchen set or complex mechanical device can be broken down into smaller components sold separately, with configuration options that affect how the components are combined or what materials the components are produced from, and all those components can be mixed and matched.

By the way, Magic Leap showcased a similar solution, but designed specifically for its augmented-reality glasses. A team of engineers can inspect a 3D engine in a fixed position in the room. They can interactively decompose it into parts, select them, show detailed information, and discuss the options. That is fantastic!

ThreeKit 3D product visualization demo

Adverity

Adverity presented its platform for marketing data integration: a set of pre-built connectors to marketing data sources, such as social networks and web analytics. The platform also provides data-aggregation mechanisms, as well as analytics and visualization capabilities.

Celebrity guests

Alicia Tillman, SAP CMO, joined supermodel, entrepreneur, and philanthropist Karlie Kloss on stage to talk about how she helps young women pursue careers in computing. That is how I learned that Karlie’s visibility extends far beyond the world of fashion. She shared details about her initiative, “Kode With Klossy,” a program the model launched in 2015 to encourage girls to learn to code. It will now host 50 camps in 25 cities and counting.

Karlie Kloss has been announced by SAP as its newest global spokesmodel and brand ambassador.

Karlie Kloss on stage at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

Bill McDermott, SAP CEO, had a wonderful talk with Sandra Bullock. Sandra told us about her early years in acting, flavoring her story with lots of humor and laughs. She pointed out that the bottom part of her IMDb page is less than ideal. “You can learn a lot from ugly bottoms!”

Sandra Bullock and Bill McDermott on stage at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

As a final chord, Lady Gaga brought her ENIGMA show on Thursday night.

In the next video from the concert, Lady Gaga explains SAP in her own words — thanks to Alessia Miscone for the video from LinkedIn:

“I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, but I have no clue what you guys do. But the good news, it doesn’t matter because I know so much of the world would not operate without you.”

A big “thanks” to SAP for the wonderful conference. It was a perfect mix of topics, people, and social gatherings, and definitely a major source of inspiration and resources for me. I not only truly enjoyed it, but also found a lot of topics worth sharing on Hybrismart.com. Work is already in progress, and it shouldn’t take too long to get the results here. Stay tuned!

Rauf Aliev
Solution Architect
r.aliev@gmail.com
rauf_aliev@epam.com