Insights Success The 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers 2017

JULY 2017

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10MOST Valuable

THE

SAP

Solution

Providers

2017

Teresa Mackintosh CEO

Business Corner SAP: Generating Business Value from Internet of Things

FutureTech Future of Technology Through the Eyes of SAP Experts

TRINTECH Transforming the Ofď€ ce of Finance through Risk Intelligent Automation

Editorial

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hen we talk about futuristic technologies, then the first thing that comes into our mind is about the robots. With the advent of automation, robots have been playing a vital role in automating mundane tasks to make them faster and less labour intensive, and SAP has helped automating processes with robots across all functional business processes including finance transactions, personnel and customer related accomplishments. Common areas that have seen success include payroll, accounts payable, employee action and customer service.

Laying Down the Foundation Stone of Futuristic Technologies with SAP

With the recent advancements in Robotic Process Automation with the application of SAP, the image processing domain has taken a glorious turn, and document imaging has become more user friendly and cost effective as it was never before. Taking this opportunity into consideration, companies are converting paper documents into something digital, working out the text and content with optical character recognition, and then rendering the information in a system that can be routed appropriately through the organization for review, consideration and approval.

SAP has also been positioning its offerings as the digital core for modern business working on the cloud, S/4 and HANA, and is currently in an active delivery cycle, producing product updates and adding features. SAP's focus on S/4HANA is at extraordinary level, and the coming innovations on the core HANA platform are going to be interesting – HANA has truly proved itself to be a full fledged development and runtime environment, and not just an in memory database. Hosting applications using a wide range of technologies, such as TomEE and Node.js, and providing enterprise integration options, has only been possible with the help of world class development tools of SAP. With the help of SAP, entrepreneurs are leveraging their business in the domain of Big Data, Block Chain, Cloud Computing, Digital Business, IoT and Machine Learning. The pace in which SAP is helping small and big business grow and excel, the future of technology seems to be in safe hands and for sure it will bring a glorious change for the betterment of mankind.

Sagar Bhattacharjee

Increasing customer acceptability with scalable and functional solutions based on the SAP Platform

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AP is always committed to continuous innovations, and has been leveraging both small and large enterprises by helping them grow and excel. With the increase in customer acceptability the depth of solution’s scalability and functionality has also increased. Taking advantage of these SAP solutions, companies are remodeling their structure to offer company wide visibility and agility. To flash the spotlight on the achievements of these admiring companies, we are introducing the issue of The 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers 2017.

We have listed some exceptional companies that are not just implementing SAP in their business, but working enthusiastically to provide world class solutions and enterprise grade service.

In this issue, on the cover, we have Trintech, which is transforming the office of finance through Risk Intelligent Automation. Trintech develops financial software solutions with an aim to provide its clients increased efficiency, visibility, and control to minimize resources, costs, and risks across the entire Record to Report process.

Also, we have the most prominent SAP solution providers in this issue which includes, AES Corporation, which is a Fortune 200 global power company, and is well known for providing affordable, sustainable energy to 17 countries.

Approyo, for being the leading global SAP technology solution provider, which makes it simple for companies to implement big data solutions through SAP HANA for today and the future. Configurable Management, for providing training, mentoring, and supporting services to their clients with their SAP, Winshuttle, and SharePoint software.

Coupa Software, which is a cloud platform for business spend that is SAP ICC certified in SAP S/4HANA® integration and SAP NetWeaver® integration. Gigas, which is one of the emerging leaders in the Cloud Computing industry with their secure, stable, efficient and flexible cloud hosting services for customers of all types. Herrington Technology, for providing SAP Business Software and Hybrid Cloud Managed Services for advanced and accelerated business processing. rFactr, which is a B2B sales technology and strategy company trusted by the world’s best sales organizations who are using social media to drive leads, opportunities, and revenue. Spinnaker Support, which is the world's fastest growing provider of SAP third-party support and managed services, delivering unparalleled support for a fraction of the cost, while helping customers progress to their transformational objectives. Xpandion, which is a leading provider of ERP usage inspection solutions, delivering unprecedented real-time visibility into management systems, significantly improving security, optimizing licensing usage and enabling GRC/SOX compliance.

We have included SAP Cloud Platform and the Future of Development for SAP and Leverage Existing SAP Solutions with Cloud Procurement, derived from the thoughts of James Wood and Brad Hill, respectively.

Also, we have a great contribution of masterly articles scripted by our in-house writers, Future of Technology Through the Eyes of SAP Experts and SAP: Generating Business Value from Internet of Things.

So, do flip the pages of our magazine, and we do believe that this issue will satisfy all your SAP solution provider’s information needs.

Conte

Cover story Trintech: Transforming the OfďŹ ce of Finance through Risk Intelligent Automation

08 CXO Standpoint

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36 SAP Cloud Platform and the Future of Development for SAP

Leverage Existing SAP Solutions with Cloud Procurement

Article

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FutureTech

Business Corner

Editor’s Pick

Future of Technology Through the Eyes of SAP Experts

SAP: Generating Business Value from Internet of Things

Vitality of R&D in an Organization's Growth

ents

Approyo:

Simplifying the Cloud

18 Coupa Software : The Cloud Platform Which Everyone Loves to Use

Gigas:

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Providing World-Class Cloud Hosting Services

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30 Herrington Technology: Differentiated and Value-Driven SAP Delivery

Spinnaker Support: Exceptional third party support and managed services for SAP

40 Xpandion:

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Ongoing Improvement of the SAP System

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Senior Editor Ariana Lawrence Managing Editor Sagar Bhattacharjee Co-Editors Pooja Jain Sachin Bhandare David Smith Contributors Sourav, Rajarshi, Piyush, Kaustav Visualiser David King Art & Design Director Amol Kamble Co-designer Alex Noel Picture Editor Vinod Alhat Art Editor Shweta Shinde Business Development Manager Mike Thomas Nick Adams Marketing Manager Chris Clarke Business Development Executives Richard Davis Sophie Smith Research Analyst Jennifer Circulation Manager Robert Database Management Steve Technology Consultant Vishal More sales@insightssuccess.com

JULY, 2017 Corporate Ofď€ ces: Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: Visit www.insightssuccess.com 7

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Cover Story

Teresa Mackintosh CEO

Cover Story

Transforming the Office of Finance through Risk Intelligent Automation

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Trintech uniquely met our integration needs with minimal IT involvement, across our diverse SAP deployment

Cover Story

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ue to growth through mergers and acquisitions, aggressive expansion during high growth periods and historical local system purchasing decisions, most finance organizations struggle to maintain a heterogenous ERP application portfolio.

“Several of our large, enterprise-class customers that have chosen to partner with SAP® still identify challenges in regards to their financial close process due to the manual aggregation of information for period-end reporting that sits outside the ERP,” says Teresa Mackintosh, CEO at Trintech. “This manual work makes it incredibly difficult for companies to effectively deliver the required information for shareholder/investor and regulatory reporting, leading to high risk across the process and the business.”

Having to rework the numbers after the close, incurring re-audit fees from third party auditors, re-statements of earnings and fines from governing bodies become all too common. So, what can be done to reduce this extensive manual effort and ensure standardization of processes and integrity of financial data?

Ensuring the Integrity of Your Financial Close Process with Cadency® While the ERP plays a significant role in the management and automation of daily operations, it lacks the functionality to handle the complexity of the financial close process. With Trintech’s enterprise-class cloud-based solution, Cadency®, financial executives have the world’s only finance governance solution that integrates seamlessly into their existing ERP systems, specifically SAP®, to streamline all of the Record to Report (R2R) activities into a single, process. It provides you with the means of collating all the critical data in a single view, and can eliminate those white spaces that sit outside the ERP by providing pre-built Connectors and agnostic integration capabilities to standardize across the business. From automating and managing balance sheet reconciliations, managing intercompany workflow and transactions, journal entries, disclosure and fiduciary reporting and bank fee analysis, to governance, risk and compliance – Trintech’s Cadency solution optimizes resources, reduces cost and improves governance and transparency across the entire financial close process.

‘‘ Trintech’s Cadency® solution optimizes resources, reduces cost, and improves governance and transparency across the entire financial close process

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Through its Risk Intelligent Robotic Process Automation™ capabilities, Cadency allows finance executives to succeed in a changing environment by exhibiting controlled agility – “controlled”, to ensure the highest level of data accuracy and integrity in financial close data, and “agility”, to adapt to and meet organizational changes that mitigate risk. This single end-to-end solution delivers real-time visibility into the financial close for the C-Suite, producing data-driven insights to propel strategic growth.

With all this information in one place, an executive console delivers real-time transparency and instant visibility to senior executives, enabling them to oversee the current status and make decisions and deliver actions before they impact the numbers. This also allows all financial close stakeholders across the organizations, in and around the world, to easily communicate and collaborate, creating real-time communities across the Office of Finance.

Industry Visionaries Partner with Trintech Trintech has an impressive customer base with over 1,700 clients worldwide – including the majority of the Fortune 100 – relying on it’s cloud-based software to help integrate into their existing ERP systems and drive valuable insights across their business, while leaving the manual and non-judgmental tasks for the robots.

Siemens Corporation: Siemens launched a project to “bundle” its regional infrastructure functions. The objectives of this project were to improve efficiency and compliance and to standardize on a common set of processes. Siemens looked to its Global Shared Services organization to play a key role in the success of this project. When the project kicked off, the account reconciliation process was very decentralized amongst each

of the company’s business units. Many locations relied on Excel and multiple shared directories to perform general ledger account reconciliations.

Siemens wanted an efficient, automated solution that could integrate with its complex ERP environment to deliver best-in-class account reconciliation services to its various business units.

“When evaluating vendors to partner with, it was very important to us that we had tight integration with our ERP environment. In North America alone, we support 17 SAP instances as well as other ERPs and GL packages.

Trintech uniquely met our integration needs with minimal IT involvement, across our diverse SAP deployment.” said Rob Koca, Corporate Controller at Siemens.

Since implementing Cadency, Siemens has been able to reconcile 100% of its GL account and subledgers in the solution, while also reducing its overall cost to deliver by 20%. It has automated the creation, review and approval of journal entries, dramatically improving the quality and reliability of the output. Siemens continues a close partnership with Trintech in order to discover further ways in which the solution can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the financial close.

Cover Story

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The majority of our customers have identified challenges in regards to their Record to Report process due to the manual

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work that sits outside of their ERP

AstraZeneca: AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical company, with manufacturing, distribution and research facilities in more than 100 countries, generating $23 billion in annual revenue. The company supports a global workforce of more than 57,000 people, and utilizes five regional SAP ERP instances throughout Europe, Latin America, North America and AsiaPacifc regions. Achieving global standardardization and strengthening its compliance was AstraZeneca’s main priority in its transformation project, as it faced severe risk managing a $52 billion balance sheet in Excel.

Since implementing Cadency, AstraZeneca has discovered $2.5 million in savings, improved the productivity of its 300 users, and eliminated Excel spreadsheets, paper and manual effort. The company has increased compliance across 26,000 accounts and saved around 850 hours each month.

“Now, the Cadency dashboard will show when a reconciliation is due, who is responsible for its review and approval, and where it is in the system. If it’s not completed as expected, there are alerts. It’s easy to identify issues and get into root-cause analysis if people aren’t meeting deadlines.” — Natalie Childs, Global Process Owner, Record-to-Report and Fixed Assets, AstraZeneca.

Meet the CEO of Trintech Teresa Mackintosh, is the CEO of Trintech and has over 20 years of experience working with the Accounting, Tax and Finance functions of companies world-wide, helping them to be a catalyst for organizational innovation.

Mackintosh began her career as a CPA at PwC and has since held several senior leadership roles in the finance and accounting space. She has experience serving a multitude of business units across Thomson Reuters with responsibilities ranging from product development to general management. Prior to joining Trintech, Mackintosh served as Chief Executive Officer at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting in the U.S. She has been recognized as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People in Accounting,” and has also been named to the “Most Powerful Women in Accounting” list several times.

Mackintosh received both her BBA and MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Future Tech

Future of

Technology Through the Eyes of SAP Experts

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lock is ticking by and the time is moving away every moment. What is future today, will be passed soon. As days pass by, it becomes easier for the industry experts to guess about the future, but not every professional is a specialist. Technology is fast evolving, and the future is arriving at a rapid pace. But it becomes difficult sometimes to move with the flow, and only those strive in the race who run ahead of the flow and not behind.

Like any other industry, SAP is advancing too with a lightning speed. And to be in the race, the industry experts are making some suggestions about the changes taking place in the world of technology which one should be cautious about to prepare themselves for the battle to fight.

Everyone is aware that the future is coming, but they are not aware of how it is coming and how that change of wind can bring success or blow everything, respectively. With each of these noted changes, enterprises can plot their plan to make themselves ready for the coming digital future.

Future looks in the following way through the eyes of SAP futurists: Augmented reality and Immersive Technology is going to be the Change-Factor A few years back, no one knew about the concept of augmented reality and apparently, the market barely existed.

Industry results suggest that there was nothing on the

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enterprise side and the applications are beginning to get built now on. Companies might start to use the technology of augmented technology to walk the field of several service reps through the processes-repair or, in an IoT (Internet of Things). This technological shift is believed to trigger data transfer in real-time and reduced costs whether it is supplied inventories, in a case of planned or actual spending. Experts suggest that to stay in the race, enterprises must renovate their work by adding virtual or augmented reality into their existing apps or the new ones that they are planning to launch.

Blockchain Can Change the Scenario Entirely Foreseers have already said that blockchain possess an enormous potential and it can change the entire scenario.

Though it is known that blockchain will modify the industry, how it will alter is still unknown. SAP gurus have defined the ways in which the industry will see the advancements. It is expected that this technology will help enterprises to experience understand business process better and mission-critical systems. Tech-experts are viewing the influence of the blockchain through a full end-to-end business perspective and predicting that it is going to bring significant advances in the industry as improvement in the supply chain efficiency, process speed, transparency and facilitation in business networks and exchanges.

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Influence of Artificial Learning is going to Increase There has not been a day when the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has stopped to enter the veins of every industry slowly.

Since its inception in the 1950s, the technology is rapidly advancing and expanding its wings. The industry can presently see the influence in two different versions as machine learning and deep learning. Experts say that this is the year which is going to witness a genuine rise of AI. Machine Learning is helping enterprises in learning by statistics and self-learning with qualified data.

Specifically, in the case of SAP solution industry, tech-gurus are betting on the deep learning algorithms to hit business, and they believe that those algorithms will change the way how business works.

Robotics and the Emergence of Cyborgs Cyborgs are emerging, and the prominence in its usage is expanding. Industry will soon see that the world is turning into a land for testing as it is considered to be an ideal for machine learning and algorithms. Even experts are finding it difficult to predict the future as soon the day will come when the machines will bring in co-evolution with an extreme level of co-operation between human and machine. This collaboration has already been proved to be successful in the world of medicine, but the other industries are expected to experience the same very soon.

Automation is Going to Transform the Industry’s Economic Structure It is quite clear that automation is going to change the workflow and the complete structure of work with its advancements in technology and ease in the work that it offers. But the bigger picture is here, how the workforce is getting affected, and the digitalization of the economy is taking place. Automation will soon take over the employment industry and replace multiple jobs in the market. Every company is focused on managing a contingent workforce and enable better training during the hiring process. With the application of automation into its workforce, the entrepreneurs are expected to get relief from certain problems and experience more economically stable condition.

The world says that the people are aware that the wind is coming yet they are taking no steps to prevent it. They realize how the technological transformation is taking place, but they are doing nothing to address that, which is considered to be a major problem. But the experts apparently say that the main point is not how these futuristic technologies are helping businesses satisfy customers or enhancing market or economy, the way how they work together and bring value to the business is what matters the most.

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Company Name

Management

Brief

AES Corporation www.aes.com

Andres Gluski CEO

The AES Corporation (NYSE: AES) is a Fortune 200 global power company. They provide affordable, sustainable energy to 17 countries through their diverse portfolio of distribution businesses as well as thermal and renewable generation facilities.

Approyo www.approyo.com

Christopher Carter CEO

Approyo is a leading global SAP technology solution provider which makes it simple for companies to implement big data solutions through SAP HANA for today and the future.

Configurable Management www.cfg-mgt.com

Steven Branch CEO

Configurable Management provides training, mentoring, and supporting services to their clients with their SAP, Winshuttle, and SharePoint software.

Coupa Software www.coupa.com

Robert Bernshteyn CEO

Coupa is the cloud platform for business spend that is SAP ICC certified in SAP S/4HANA® integration and SAP NetWeaver® integration.

Gigas www.gigas.com

Diego Cabezudo CEO

Gigas is one of the emerging leaders in the Cloud Computing industry with their secure, stable, efficient and flexible cloud hosting services for customers of all types.

www.herringtontechnology.net

Valery Herrington CEO

Herrington Technology provides SAP Business Software and Hybrid Cloud Managed Services for advanced and accelerated business processing. Herrington Technology has World's Top SAP Technology expert leadership.

rFactr www.rfactr.com

Richard Brasser CEO

rFactr is a B2B sales technology and strategy company trusted by the world’s best sales organizations who are using social media to drive leads, opportunities, and revenue.

www.spinnakersupport.com

Mathew Stava Co-founder & CEO

Spinnaker Support is the world’s fastest growing provider of SAP third-party support and managed services, delivering unparalleled support for a fraction of the cost, while helping customers progress to their transformational objectives.

Trintech www.trintech.com

Teresa Mackintosh CEO

Trintech develops financial software solutions with an aim to provide its clients increased efficiency, visibility, and control to minimize resources, costs, and risks across the entire Record to Report process.

Xpandion www.xpandion.com

Moshe Panzer CEO

Xpandion is the leading provider of ERP usage inspection solutions, delivering unprecedented real-time visibility into management systems, significantly improving security, optimizing licensing usage and enabling GRC/SOX compliance.

Herrington Technology

Spinnaker Support

Approyo: Simplifying the Cloud realizing the business potentials that drives growth, improves ROI and lowers the risk factors by using SAP applications. Since inception, Approyo has maintained a goodwill of one of the largest US based SAP HANA firms. The company is enriched with SAP HANA expertise with over 200 SAP S/4 HANA and SAP HANA environments worldwide. With a team of experts from all over the world, Approyo is helping businesses grow.

Approyo is on the Forefront of Technology

Christopher Carter CEO

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ith every new day, innovation comes into the world of technology. Stagnancy and constancy are the words which are inapplicable to the technological aspects of the world. These transformations in the technological sector provoke the change that companies demand. Sometimes, the need, demands and the choices of people are the reasons that lead to the transformations in the world. Among the tech giants leading the industry stands Approyo, a global SAP technology solution provider. Being the only SAP partner that allows to choose a suitable cloud environment, Approyo manages and supports their clients by revolutionizing the adoption of SAP and SAP HANA solutions, ultimately making SAP simple for all businesses.

Approyo is dedicated to the success of their customers by providing expertise to help facilitate business growth, improve efficiency and increase the profitability of businesses worldwide. Putting a stop to the long duration of cloud migrations, Approyo sets up customer environments in just a few hours or days in an SAP certified cloud.

With a truly comprehensive SAP portfolio and deep understanding of business processes, the company works towards helping its customers in

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Approyo revolves itself with the changing face of technology by providing the most updated and effective solutions.

Providing the SAP solutions in the quickest and most effective way to the customers is the prime motto of the company.

Approyo support companies to have a true SAP S/4HANA sandbox ready for them to be used anytime with SAP S/4HANA Ignite. This revolutionizes the world of SAP with a production grade sandbox at an extremely low cost, set up quickly on a secured SAP Certified network. This plays the role of game changer for all SAP customers who want to try S/4 HANA 1610 and ultimately migrate to S/4 HANA. Approyo is known to provide various services for various needs of their customers like Cloud Ignite, SAP HANA Ignite, SAP S/4HANA Ignite, GRC Ignite, SAP Solutions, Hadoop Solutions and Big Data Solutions. The company JULY 2017 |

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Revolutionize your data and ignite your future with Approyo’s SAP solutions

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looks at the current and future business needs and this is what gives its customers a better insight and access to important business data, enabling them to look at the big picture needs. Based on the needs of their customers, this SAP solution providing company gives its customers a roadmap to succeed one step at a time.

Providing Unique Solutions to Every Individual Challenge It is a well-known fact that every company that runs SAP is different and each of them have a unique challenge and opportunity to offer. Approyo is strictly against the concept of “One size fits all”, rather they maintain a good-will of providing personalized solutions for each of their clients. As quoted by the company, “We work with companies across multiple industries and by working with so many different companies, it allows us to anticipate questions that companies don’t even know they have yet.”

organization, both with predictive modeling and through the analysis of huge data sets. This work would have been impossible on the in-house infrastructure.”

Experience Where it Matters With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the “Big Data” and “SAP” industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo founded Approyo with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him a national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more.

looking to grow and expand thier business and technology processes, where even one percent can lead to millions of dollars in business flow.

The company follows the idea of “Work hard and play hard” and believes in hiring only the best and brightest in the industry.

The goal of the company is to create a friendly environment where people can lean on one another and provide expertise and leadership. Approyo is growing every day and improving their services to help their clients, without changing their primary goal which is to become the most customer centric SAP HANA provider in the entire industry.

To Approyo, consistent communication and support are the key to remain the best in the market.

Under the leadership of Christopher Carter, Approyo support firms that are

Approyo serves customers from all over the world. Companies like Covenant Transportation Group (CTG) depends on Approyo for unique and extraordinary SAP solutions. While talking about the services provided by Approyo, a CTG official said, “By leveraging Approyo’s in depth knowledge of the HANA architecture, we could build an analytics engine to solve the needs of the CTG

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Coupa Software: The Cloud Platform Which Everyone Loves to Use onboard, Coupa delivers an Open Business Network™ that connects more than three million suppliers worldwide.

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Leading the Industry with Innovative Cloud Solutions Coupa offers its customers the most innovative solutions spanning travel and expense management, procurement, and invoicing, and when combined with their fully unified power applications in embedded analytics, sourcing, contract management and inventory, their cloud platform delivers faster return on investment and the control, agility, and visibility critical for businesses to compete. The company is popularly known to offer their industry’s first set of Community Intelligence capabilities that allows each of their customers to learn from the collective insights of their clients. At Coupa they believe, “Numbers speaks louder than words,” and the company doesn’t believe in boasting about themselves; instead their customers talk about Coupa and its services.

Purposely built for the cloud, Coupa is known to deliver the only spend management platform that unifies business processes across all the ways employees spend money. Coupa is SAP ICC certified in SAP S/4HANA® integration and SAP NetWeaver® integration. The Coupa Platform is known to connect businesses easily and seamlessly to SAP Cloud and on premise. The company has designed and digitized financial applications with the idea of consumerization in mind and helping businesses in different sectors all across travel and expense management, procurement and invoicing. With a team of 800 extraordinarily talented employees

Reports suggests that Coupa has helped various companies to grow their business; namely, they aided newly minted Fortune 500 Company, Molina Healthcare in scale procurement, Tire Centers to drive savings and improve operational efficiency and Staples to gain visibility and control of $3 billion in global spend. To Coupa, their customers’ achievement is a part of their success; hence, they have supported multinationals like Concentrix, Avalon Healthcare, Service Corporation International, CSAA Insurance Group, NEC and many others in stabilizing their businesses.

Rob Bernshteyn CEO n the current digital era, business leaders must be updated and stay on top of new, emerging and the future technologies or risk staying back.

Nobody wants to fall back, and every business leader is fighting to climb the ladder up to come on the top of people’s minds. Anything and everything in the world of technology are transforming daily; like big data, the blockchain, cloud computing, digital business, IoT, machine learning, mobile and their impact on SMEs. While talking about cloud computing systems and SAP Solution Providers, one can never miss the name of Coupa Software Inc., (NASDAQ:COUP) the company which provides a cloud platform for Business Spend that every user loves to use.

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With Coupa, our customers are able to increase visibility and control their entire business spend as well as extend the value that their SAP ERP delivers to their entire organization

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Increases Customers’ Visibility and enhances Control Over Business Spends Customers have reported having increased visibility and gained control over their entire business spends with the services of Coupa Software. The company also allows their customers to extend the value that their SAP ERP delivers to their organization as a whole. One can consider the case of Juniper Networks, which rolled out Coupa to more than 40 Countries to eliminate paper, digitize processes and reduce costs. It is quite clear by the business reports that customers like Juniper are standardizing business processes for operational efficiency, regulatory compliance and spend visibility.

Industry reports apparently said that Coupa is leading the industry with a clear focus on comprehensive spend management. One does not become a leader overnight, and it takes several sleepless nights and endless efforts to make this happen. Similarly, Coupa has always offered its customers something more and unique solutions in a much faster pace than their competitors. They have developed the next generation community intelligence which is leveraging the power of all customers to provide prescriptive insights unavailable through any other means. The cloud platform provider is continuing to leverage what they have started to

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build and infusing their entire platform with normative ideas that allow their customers to gain a competitive edge by using the solutions of Coupa.

About the Man Behind the Leading Cloud Platform With a wealth of experience of more than two decades in the business software industry, Rob Bernshteyn, CEO at Coupa, drives the company’s strategy and execution. Prior to Coupa, he has served various enterprises like SuccessFactors, Siebel Systems, McKinsey and Accenture at the top executive level making innovations in the industry.

Apart from having a rich industry experience, Rob is also a guest lecturer at Harvard and Stanford business schools and a frequent contributor to Forbes and Fortune Magazines. He is often seen doing commentary on major channels like Bloomberg and NPR. Rob has earned his BS degree in Information Systems from the University of New York at Albany and an MBA from Harvard Business School. With all the knowledge and experience, Rob is supporting the team

at Coupa to help each member to reach their highest potential.

Coupa Feels Proud to Serve Customers Worldwide The company feels lucky to work with customers across the globe that has progressive IT organizations. Coupa is motivated to be more innovative, collaborative and successful. They are truly passionate about their vision for innovations with community intelligence to excitedly help lead the industry towards a better way. Coupa is known in the market as a mobile, collaborative community that does not seek to work in silos sheltered in a cube. The company is dedicated to delivering cloud spend management in a way that’s never been done before.

While talking about the future perspective of Coupa, Rob said, “I see us expanding our global reach, particularly in the Asia Pacific and LATAM markets.” Coupa expects its cloud platform to be embedded community intelligence across applications in a way that every user experiences more efficiency and becomes smarter while just touching Coupa’s platform.

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Vitality of R&D in an Organization’s Growth

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esearch and Development plays an important role in leveraging technology to reap maximum benefits in the form of innovative products, processes, and services. Many companies tend to think that R&D is like a holy grail, but it’s not!

They do not understand the importance until its too late.

The fact is that, R&D is the only function that provides a platform for innovation and creativity to flourish in an organization.

Numerous innovative breakthroughs happen only because of meticulous efforts of the R&D function. Consistent efforts are needed when one is in quest of research, every failure in R&D effort escalates the pressure to perform.

Is R&D that Important?

One is knowledge and another one is technology, these are the two

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JULY 2017 |

vital ingredients for the recipe of innovation, and for successful R&D; innovation is the only prima facie.

organizational growth by introducing breakthrough products in the market.

When a company takes R&D into significant consideration, they get a huge influx of knowledge. This is what makes these companies so amazingly successful, their contribution to R&D melts down to a world of useful knowledge which the company can use to further develop its main product lines.

The Key to Everything is Patience, you get Chicken by Hatching it, not by Smashing it.

– Arnold H.Glasow

R&D helps a business to have a competitive edge over its competitors. It is only the R&D function that helps organizations develop plans much ahead than other functions. The R&D function requires a clear foresight about future problems and its solutions, in its development role, it can act as a catalyst for speeding up the

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The R&D efforts can take some time to materialize, but once they succeed, the financial returns can be quite high.

Many successful companies in industry sectors like pharmaceuticals, chemical and automotive, invest a substantial amount of capital expenditure and strive to be ahead of others because they believe; expenses on R&D are not to be considered as expenditure but as an investment.

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The true test of R&D function lies in time to market. Business exists for the sake of making proďŹ ts. So, the role of R&D in minimizing the time to market becomes extremely important. Unless the R&D efforts in the lab cannot be scaled up within a reasonable time frame, little can be expected in terms of the functional credit to be assigned to R&D. SigniďŹ cance of R&D for Medium and Small Business Big MNCs have billions to spend on R&D but most of the small businesses do not have the same capabilities, this does not mean R&D is impossible. There are plenty of government initiatives, which are aimed at leveraging the R&D opportunities for medium and small business. Even venture capitalists have also recognized the importance of these smaller entries.

Moreover, R&D is typically what your business can take advantage of public resources and eternal knowledge to get some hands on experience because, at the end of the day, useful knowledge is the most important thing your company needs. The R&D department is not worth of, if the desired outcomes of R&D are not utilized.

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CXO Standpoint

Leverage Existing

SAP Solutions

with Cloud Procurement

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ompanies that have already invested in SAP find that they can achieve even better results from their existing investment with cloud technology and eProcurement. After the initial investment, companies find certain roadblocks preventing mass user adoption and diminishing cost savings. Issues such as inability to stay connected, lack of insight into data, and complex and fragmented business rules stop businesses from using the full power of SAP. As cloud application technologies advance, companies gain the benefits of rapid deployment cycles, increased self-service tools, and faster performance.

Vroozi delivers on the promise and power of eProcurement in the Cloud with seamless integration into SAP. SAP users looking to the cloud generally face a few questions, including: · How can I benefit from using cloud procurement? · Will my transition to the cloud be cost-effective? · How will my business processes be affected by cloud technology?

To understand the benefits of cloud technology to existing SAP users, let’s evaluate three procurement strategies that highlight the power of cloud procurement.

Value Realization Return on Investment (ROI) is a central factor in any

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procurement strategy. Buyers and trading partners of cloud procurement solutions need to feel confident that solutions will lead to cost savings and higher productivity and efficiency. Users quickly see returns by focusing on user adoption, compliance, and spend management. Spend Management allows companies to visualize purchasing spending patterns and usage and drives employees to leverage preferred pricing with contract suppliers. To increase user adoption and compliance, the cloud empowers a mobile workforce with the right resources and experience so everyone stays connected and available so that business is not disrupted. As user adoption and compliance frameworks increase with cloud-based systems, organizations gain immediate cost savings in procurement by decreasing transaction costs and preventing spend leakage with your supply chain.

Efficiencies Process efficiency is key for a successful, healthy business.

Cloud technology enables better processes by keeping everyone connected through a mobile experience and automating transaction tasks through the use of machine learning and pattern matching. With a centralized, unified system, cloud automation can yield immediate benefits in requisition to invoice and payment business processes and reduced errors and issues leading to higher productivity and decreased processing costs. Further, by allowing employees

JULY 2017 |

CXO Standpoint

to interact with cloud procurement via smart Phones and tablets, business can continue to move with efficiency and speed.

IT Cost Savings Perhaps no determinant is more important in realizing the benefits of cloud technologies versus traditional on premise software is in IT Cost Savings. Systems and applications which required large physical infrastructure and monetary investments can now provide inexpensive and scalable solutions through the Cloud and cloud infrastructure providers. A procurement solution that integrates with SAP is easier to access, less expensive, and takes a fraction of the implementation time companies once faced with traditional software solutions.

Cloud technology relieves the user of hidden costs such as hardware, consultants, infrastructure, maintenance, and costly upgrade cycles, providing lower risk and lower total cost of ownership.

Conclusion The cloud offers little upfront expense, automatic upgrades, and pre-integrated best practices which allow organizations to focus on business growth and improved operating margins. Vroozi’s eProcurement solution that takes SAP solutions to the cloud empower users with better returns, better processes and higher savings, so their overall SAP investment’s ROI is accelerated.

According to IDC, spending on Cloud computing is growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009 and is expected to continue growing at more than 6 times the rate of IT spending from 2015 through 2020. (via Forbes) This massive growth is easily understood when businesses understand the power and value of cloud solutions. With the Vroozi Platform, companies can take advantage of robust eProcurement technology delivered in the Cloud and integrated seamlessly with SAP.

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Brad Hill Director of Global Sales & Marketing Vroozi Brad Hill, Director of Global Sales & Marketing of Vroozi is a passionate leader and is responsible for expanding the Vroozi Product Suite, Brand Adoption, Partnership Network & ensuring our customers receive an unparalleled experience with Vroozi. Brad spent the last 20 years building Enterprise Sales and Product strategies with leading IT Services organizations. His entrepreneurial strategies have served a vast number of Fortune 500 industries and verticals. He is also an aspiring mechanic and frustrated golfer, two good reminders to keep his day job.

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Gigas: Providing World-Class Cloud Hosting Services offering sound technical support. It should come as no surprise that last year Gigas won the tender to be one of the five official suppliers of public cloud services to the European Commission and its Agencies.

Diego Cabezudo, Co-founder & CEO

I

n the last few years, Cloud-based services have become more of a standard solution for the enterprise world. It is further estimated that cloud-computing will continue to grow at a robust pace in the next five years. Their establishment in the IT market is due to the unmatched advantages that it offers. It provides quick access to functionality, flexibility due to subscriptions, scalability to support evolving business needs and reduces IT efforts. One of the emerging leaders in this highly competitive market is Gigas, a Spanish Cloud Computing company listed on the Madrid Stock Exchange since 2015. They have built a world-class cloud hosting business that provides best-in-class solutions and services to customers worldwide.

Established by proficient internet experts, Gigas offers the most powerful cloud hosting solutions to customers from all verticals, in a simple, safe, reliable, flexible, scalable, efficient and cost-effective manner. They have emerged as a true market leader in its native Spanish market and keySpanish markets throughout Latin America, thereby attracting large enterprises such as Walmart, Aon, Diners Club, OHL, United Nations, Canal 13 and various others. They are well-known for their close operating relationship with their customers, providing tailored solutions and for

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Breaking-free from the Shackles When the company was formed in 2011, Gigas spotted SAP as the perfect match for the cloud services it was offering to its customers. Cloud Infrastructure as a service back then was almost nonexistent in the Spanish market. It was their visionary that enabled them to foresee a future in which the rapid adoption of certain mission-critical applications with significant computing needs supported by virtualized infrastructure made total sense.

For an on-premise environment, putting together an enterprise application SAP involved an enormous investment upfront. In addition to the hefty investments, implementation time to set up the infrastructure also takes longer.

Before setting up Gigas, these problems were pre-existent within the industry. The idea behind the launch of Gigas was to address and solve these issues, by reducing implementation time to market dramatically, scaling infrastructure resources up or down as per the business requirements and more importantly, by reducing costs.

Providing a Pool of Services Gigas SAP-certified Cloud Datacenter is the only available solution in the market that allows their customers to define and design their own cloud infrastructure.

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‘‘

The security and trust that we build with our clients is what really sets us apart

‘‘

Unlike its contemporaries, they do not sell virtual machinery, rather a set of unlimited resources (RAM, memory, storage) to replicate a physical data center in a virtual environment. Within their Cloud Datacenter, they provide their customers with a basic firewall for each of their servers. Gigas offers the most advanced security solutions through their partnerships with some of the leading firewall vendors such as Fortinet.

Their Cloud Datacenter solution is one of the few in the world to comply with the new European Code of Conduct for Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers.

This, in turn, ensures optimum privacy of customer’s data and is in compliance with the strict European Data Protection regulations.

In addition to all the services mentioned above, Gigas is obsessed with providing the best technical support among its contemporaries.

They understand that in complex environments problems are bound to spring up, which is why they strive towards providing a knowledgeable and empowered customer technical support to solve customer issues and queries as soon as possible. With a track record of solving over 80% of their customer queries within their first contact itself, Gigas holds an unprecedented position in providing customer satisfaction.

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An Inspiring Duo with an Eye for the Future Gigas was found and built from the bottom by the duo of Jose Antonio Arribas, who currently holds the COO position, and Diego Cabezudo, the CEO of the company. It was them who spotted SAP as the perfect match for the cloud services they wanted to offer their customers. Their ideas and astute prediction of the future market trends, propelled Gigas to what it is known as today.

Their combined experience of over 40 years in the tech arena, led Gigas to become the leading cloud hosting company in Spain and a growing force in the Latin American market. Among the two, Jose holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Technology, whereas Diego completed Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Navarra in Spain. The latter further continued with his study by completing an Executive MBA course from the London Business School.

Living up to the Responsibilities of Hosting a SAP Platform It is of enormous responsibility to host a SAP platform that supports some of the most critical processes and information of a company. Customers are always on the lookout for companies that can provide an enterprise grade service, but at the

same time be available locally whenever there is a requirement for complex implementations or when a problem arises. Gigas, with its local offices and personnel throughout Spain and Latin America, a proficient technical support team in Spanish, and other unparalleled services, it provides a significant advantage for its customers.

Gigas was one of the first cloud providers who were awarded with the SAP “Infrastructure Operations Service” certification in 2014. Having gone through the process of certifying their platform and with the experience of having deployed dozens of SAP environments, Gigas knows how to optimize the platform so that the processes can run smoothly, efficiently and reliably. This triggers an improvement in performance, productivity, and corporate efficiency.

In fact, their certifications and expertise have helped many of their existing customers to make the decision to migrate their SAP applications to the cloud. Cloud computing has solved and improved IT operations from different angles, but it also offers significant advantages to today’s companies. It is therefore easy to understand why Gigas platform became the solution of choice for many customers and SAP partners to deploy their SAP installations.

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Herrington Technology: Differentiated and Value-Driven SAP Delivery

Valery Herrington Founder & CEO

T

oday’s fast changing business solutions market includes dynamic factors like competition, efficiency, forecasting, collaboration, scalability, productivity, flexibility, customer service and streamlined processes. So, implementing ERP software, systems integration and project management has become a standard success route that ensures these capabilities are built-in to business operations. However, while implementing SAP ERP, the software, hardware and systems need to integrate with third-party solutions and tools. Herrington Technology, based in Manhattan, New York, is qualified to make sure that the implementation of all these aspects of advanced ERP solutions and systems integrations are operating top level. This U.S based powerhouse company also helps its customers with SAP S4/HANA installation, configuration, and implementation services along with unique, brand label capabilities that often lead the market sectors in one or more areas.

Established Top SAP Provider: High Value Herrington Technology is a highly differentiated and value-driven business with established, certified SAP solutions and software. The firm specializes in the “best of breed” SAP ERP software and deployments. They have

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highly scalable capabilities that includes premier IBM SAP cloud services for rapid and top-level deployments. SAP niche Hotel for Business One software for businesses running in the hotel industry (luxury and standard), custom SAP partner development projects for showcase and on-demand code enhancements, niche system integration (SI) project go-live leadership, rare SAP project SWAT Team rescue capabilities and a full line of small to enterprise firm solution model with SAP when other organizations can’t deliver. The company owner also carries the weight of a highly mature active 30-year relationship with the SAP company. This business relationship generates extensive value for SAP customers and clients in the form of in-depth operational and in-network knowledge of how to navigate the ins and outs of SAP's unique business software release cycles, features upgrades, strategic roadmaps and organizational support channels for maximized customer success. The company also provides services for the newest SAP flagship platform, S/4HANA digital core.

A Niche, Advanced Technology Enterprise Herrington Technology SAP business channel operates within a specialized multi-channel organization with Herrington Technology brand label services and solutions. This brings incredible differentiated brand value to customer delivery. Recently, this worldclass SAP-ERP software and solutions channel value has been further extended by a smart-minded leadership move of

JULY 2017 |

‘‘

We are committed to using the best tools and products for quality assurance

‘‘

corporate headquarters to New York.

With increased value for doing business from New York with clients around the globe, the company also now provides essential FinTech market capabilities crucial to the success and survivability of financial services sector. Other specialized brand label innovations extend the firm's niche beyond SAP ERP. Respected, Qualified Leadership A Manhattan-based visionary leader, Valery Herrington is the Founder and CEO of Herrington Technology. She has built the company from the ground up, that too during the worst economic condition since the great depression, which is a niche, advanced technology enterprise business today. Valery also holds a career designation of World’s Top SAP Technology Expert in cumulative expertise for a private practice owner-operator. She has also achieved degrees in Economics, German, Computer Science and a leading executive MBA degree with a specialized focus in business finance and digital technology for healthcare from John Hopkins Carey Business School. She earned recognition in industry as a “go-to” top expert for advanced, proprietary emerging big data VLDB and HPC systems and datacenter. She worked as a trusted advisor for “The A-list” of top IT firms located in the heart of Silicon Valley, CA. She is also pursuing her doctoral degree for advances in computer science and cybersecurity.

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Growing Quality and Recognition in Brand Herrington Technology is SAP EBM (Extended Business Member) certified which include many businesstechnology certifications. In addition, the firm has achieved recognition as an SAP Powerhouse and Top Most Promising SAP Provider firm. The firm also has an established business showcase on the Corporate web site that spotlights important client success stories, case studies and rare industry level delivery recognition for prior work and opportunities. The company actively stays on the leading edge providing value-driven solution packages and top-notch brand label.

Success & A Challenging Industry The industry dynamics and client requirements for ERP business customers is a highly demanding, fastpaced IT marketplace. To keep pace with the continuous marketplace challenges Herrington Technology has quickly attained certified capabilities for the latest SAP flagship Solution, SAP S/4HANA for digital core. Brand excellence and new R&D innovations, cybersecurity, FinTech, data protection and more extends capability.

Herrington Technology continues to meet other competitive challenges in industry by being open to new requirements that other vendors cannot complete. As a top SAP ERP provider they work in a valued, SAP global supply chain of $700 billion-dollars and growing.

Taking A Step Up: Generating New Jobs of the Future Herrington Technology, roles and opportunities emerge from the staffing network and from internal requirements with new jobs. The company is actively working in innovative ways to provide new jobs of the future.

Future with R&D Innovations The company is continuously working on the leading edge of the advanced technology front to provide customers and industry with high quality valuedriven business products and solutions.

The firm’s established strong market position for SAP software, services and systems implementation leads the way for growing and clients seeking to run on the new SAP digital core: SAP S/4 HANA. In addition, Herrington Technology organizational DNA continues to drive new R&D innovations, explore and develop completely new products and solutions for competitive advantage in superior customer delivery. Given today’s highly volatile and fluctuating global economy, this is a unique and important business hallmark. [Citation to professional announcement (public) SAP S/4HANA Launch, Mr. Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP SE, New York, Q1 2015.]

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SAP:

Generating Business Value from Internet of Things

T

oday, SAP is spiking in developing Internet of Things (IoT) applications and IoT services. SAP has a clear vision about the investment. There are three new IoT services which are aimed at helping enterprises to reduce costs and to develop IoT applications. The IT resource needs to manage IoT data, and derive business value from the same data.

The IoT services are SAP Connected Goods, SAP Dynamic Edge Processing and SAP IoT Application Enablement. It appears that a solid IoT application environment with new IoT services is settled by SAP to the the foundations.

IoT functionality is added in a smart way for the customers to build IoT solutions, with the help of SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). It is seen that IoT solutions in their real implementation differ substantially between deployments and need a platform as a service. Now SAP has to look forward towards the customer adoption validating the market viability of the IoT packages SAP has built. SAP’s IoT services offerings look good on an individual basis, but it may lack a coherent narrative.

SAP’s IoT approach has come a long way in a couple of years. Many take advantage not only of HANA, but so called end-to-end scenarios that top into SAP's ERP strengths. A role can be played by SAP’s HCP for customers looking for IoT services and a platform to build on. But there should be more logical view of working of all these IoT initiatives together. It is very difficult from the outside to explain how they fit together into one value proposition for customers as there are a few groups in SAP that seem to have their hands in IoT projects.

Vendors and their customers try to recognize whether IoT data can benefit their business or not. There are three aspects from which SAP access new products and challenges and they are machines, data origination and virtual modeling.

Choice Making SAP Connected Goods is an HCP-based application. It is designed to help the businesses to manage and get value out of mass market devices and machines. The reason behind getting these goods is really interesting for the customers, because the value chain can be extended

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JULY 2017 |

whether one is a manufacturer or OEM provider. Information can also be derived from these devices and have a lot more knowledge.

It can be ensured that the machines are stocked adequately and the goods are stored properly from the data collected from the devices. It can also help identify relevant device trends and use patterns, and then set up rule-based alerts to replenish stock. SAP Connected Goods also includes built-in integration with SAP Business Objects Cloud, which enables the creation of customized dashboards for analytics.

For example, take industrial coffee machines which are put in offices or stores. The type of coffee consumed can be measured and it can be known for what kind of coffee people consume from every machine, and then correlate that with location data. Now onwards, it can be figured out if there are patterns, like if people in rural areas consume different than urban areas or in different states. This allows spending the marketing money better in areas where one can know what they drink. There is no need to spend on fancy milk drinks if they, by and large,drink black coffee.

Data Living on the Verge SAP Dynamic Edge Processing is designed in a way to help deal with the data flowing into organizations from billions of IoT connected devices and sensors. This enormous and growing volume of data can overwhelm the bandwidth needed to send the data to core processing centers. So the goal of SAP Dynamic Edge Processing is to process more data at the verge of enterprise network. This can reduce transmission costs and at the same time, conserving the real-time acumen derived from the data.

A lot of the customers start small, with maybe a few hundred or thousand devices.

But, eventually, it becomes a big data problem and then there is a need to filter data at the edge. This means not to transmit the data, save transmission costs and storage | JULY 2017

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costs. So it is basically targeting the notion of handling large volumes of data and detects patterns at the edge where the data occurs. SAP Dynamic Edge Processing integrates business context information with IoT decision-making at the verge. It combines algorithms, syncing architecture and database technologies with features for device connectivity and many more.

Model Demeanor for IoT SAP IoT Application Enablement provides a way to consume and manage IoT big data without any efforts to manage the underlying data storage. To create an enhanced virtual representation of the product, it combines sensor data, business data and contextual data.

Combining an accurate virtual model of how a thing operates with real-time data collected by sensors allows detailed and realistic digital representations of a physical asset over its lifetime.

If there is any reference implementation of how to handle coolers or coffee makers, there will be customers who say, ‘My model of coffee maker is different, so I want the following attributes added.’

So, underneath all these models is something called a thing model, and the idea is to quickly whip up the next thing.

Micro services are included in IoT Application Enablement for SAP HCP which allows other systems to retrieve enriched digital twin data, including business semantics, product master data hierarchy data and customer contact documentation.

SAP IoT Application Enablement includes a software developer’s kit to build IoT applications faster by focusing on design, rather than coding for developing IoT applications. Built-in features also minimize the need to define data management by calculating aggregates, splitting data into warm and cold storage and applying data retention policies.

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JULY 2017 |

CXO Standpoint

SAP Cloud Platform and the Future of Development for SAP

or a long time, many businesses viewed their IT departments as an overhead expense which kept the business running but didn’t add a lot of value to the bottom line. In recent years, this line of thinking has changed dramatically as there have been so many notable examples where technology innovations have completely disrupted a particular industry. This change in philosophy has caused companies to make commitments towards achieving digital transformation like never before.

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become an SAP shop and that decision strongly influenced the software purchasing habits of the business. Here, if a business need arose, the company would look to SAP to provide the solution they were looking for. If the solution was a perfect match, that’s great, but even if not, there were still advantages from an IT perspective to sticking with one vendor in terms of cohesiveness, tight integration, and familiarity. On the business side of these transactions however, these kinds of choices were oftentimes not very well-received.

While such developments are exciting, this shift in philosophy has placed even more pressure on enterprise IT departments to deliver solutions in a fast and efficient way. While this is certainly a daunting task, the good news for SAP shops is that help is already here in the form of the SAP Cloud Platform. The remaining challenge is to figure out how to embrace this technology to achieve continuous integration going forward.

While a best-of-breeds approach may not be ideal from an IT perspective, individual departments want the solution that best matches their requirements. And now, with the advent of the cloud and a proliferation of SaaS offerings in the marketplace, these departments now have the freedom to purchase packaged software solutions without having to go through the IT department. Regardless of the circumstances, suffice it to say that the days of the monolithic landscape are numbered – even for companies that swear they’ll never take their ERP systems to the cloud.

Moving Towards Hybrid Landscapes One of the bigger challenges IT departments face today is that the enterprise landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented. In the old days, a company might decide to

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As the dust begins to settle on all these developments, enterprise IT departments are finding themselves left to

JULY 2017 |

About the Author James Wood, is the Principal Consultant of Bowdark Consulting, where his work domain includes being an architect and technologist in the enterprise software space. He has expertise in the development of custom software solutions using cloud-native, SAP, and Microsoft-based technologies. James’ extracurricular activities include blogging, writing, working with the SAP Mentor Community, and technology research.

James Wood

manage hybrid landscapes which combine on-premise systems with cloud-based systems. Whether these systems are provided by SAP or another vendor is largely immaterial since these systems are built using different technologies. For SAP developers, it’s not like the old days where everything was built on ABAP. Plus, when it comes to cloud-based solutions, developers are usually restricted from making changes anyway, so whatever programming language is used underneath the hood doesn’t really matter.

Innovating Around the Edges More and more, companies are starting to realize that the safest bet for building new solutions is to move towards a centralized (and separate) cloud platform like the SAP Cloud Platform. Here, rather than using proprietary technologies like ABAP to customize solutions, innovation takes place around the edges with extension apps that access application functionality through well-defined RESTful interfaces (e.g. OData). This design-by-contract approach to extension app development simplifies the design and offers lots of long-term flexibility.

To appreciate these differences, consider a typical web app built on SAP’s SAPUI5 framework (i.e. the toolkit used to create Fiori apps). If this app was developed on-premise, the basic component architecture would look something like what you see on the left-hand side of the figure below.

Here, the front-end server is a standalone instance of SAP Gateway and the back-end server might be SAP S/4 HANA or an older SAP Business Suite system.

Now, let’s imagine that the app is so successful that the business wants to be able to access the app in different

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ways. Here, there might be a desire to access the app on mobile devices/tablets. Or, perhaps the business wants to share this app with business partners via a self-service portal. In a traditional on-premise scenario, these might be difficult requirements to address due to a variety of restrictions around change management, hardware procurement/installation, and so forth.

The diagram on the right-hand side of the figure above shows how moving the app to SAP Cloud Platform changes this scenario quite a bit. In this case, data is still securely accessed via the SAP Cloud Connector component, but the app is hosted in an environment that offers all the services needed to expose the app to mobile devices, self-service portals, and more. Plus, the IT infrastructure team no longer has to worry about maintaining the front-end server or ancillary servers that might be needed.

Outlook The examples described here barely scratch the surface of what’s possible with centralized PaaS solutions like SAP Cloud Platform. The point in all this though is that the only way to keep pace with digital transformation demands is to provide developers with an environment that allows them to focus squarely on solving business problems and get out of the business of worrying about mundane proprietary details, environmental/scaling issues, and so forth.

This trend is not unique to SAP; you see it across the industry with other major vendors moving towards cloudnative designs. The benefits in terms of scalability and flexibility are too great to ignore, so we see this as a trend that’s here to stay. So, the next time you’re thinking about building a new app, maybe it’s time to see what SAP Cloud Platform can do to transform your business.

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WANT TO MANAGE YOUR IT ASSETS but lack the RESOURCES, BUDGET or TIME?

ARE YOU OVERSPENDING or buying unnecessary IT EQUIPMENT for your business?

PROBLEM RENEWING your SOFTWARE LICENSE or upgrading your SYSTEM?

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WANT TO KNOW MORE about your IT EQUIPMENT or your NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE?

Spinnaker Support: Exceptional third party support and managed services for SAP Matt Stava, CEO Matt Stava founded Spinnaker Support in 2008 and has served as the Chief Executive Officer since inception.

Initially an executive leading supply practices for internationally recognized supply chain consultancies, Matt realized that SAP and Oracle users were seeking better support with significant savings.

Under Matt's leadership, Spinnaker Support has grown by 40% annually since 2008 by proving SAP users can receive high quality software support services with less cost and then invest those savings in their technology vision.

Matt Stava Founder & CEO

I

n the digital age, business leaders must stay on top of new, emerging, and future technologies or risk falling behind. But where do you start?

You are undoubtedly already exploring the latest digital trends to identify the best options for your organization. But, how will you ever implement these options with so much of your IT budget earmarked for maintenance of on-premise software applications? Spinnaker Support is a leading third-party provider of SAP maintenance and support. Spinnaker Support SAP services are a solution to a company’s continuously pressing business problem – how to get real value out of annual software support while taking control of its technology roadmap. Spinnaker Support service delivers the same set of software break/fix, tax and regulatory, general use, and vulnerability management support one gets from SAP’s self-service model and improves upon it through a full service, highly personalized delivery model with significant savings. Their customers scored their thirdparty SAP support at nearly 99% in the latest customer satisfaction survey.

In addition to third-party support, they uniquely add high value application and technical managed services for their SAP clients. They are the fastest growing provider of SAP third-party support and managed services in the industry (39.4% sales growth in FY 2016).

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Under Matt’s vision and subsequent execution, Spinnaker Support only hires the most experienced and proven software engineers, with substantial application and surrounding technology stack expertise. The team consistently follows ISO 9001:2015 standards and avoids shortcuts that infringe on the intellectual property rights of others. In May of 2012, Spinnaker Support launched the SAP Support Division.

Umpteen benefits for the clients Spinnaker Support customers gain expert and personalized annual software support service; tremendous annual savings; freedom to choose their own path of technology innovation. Spinnaker Support is providing a range of services that customers respect and embrace.

Their SAP customers span 87 countries and they support 305 instances of SAP software, ranging from R/3 through ECC6. The company currently supports more than 120 SAP products, including BusinessObjects and HANA Database.

Additionally, Spinnaker Support is JULY 2017 |

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Delivering cutting-edge, fast return-on-investment SAP support, advisory, and managed services for a fraction of the cost

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maintaining Oracle’s Runtime Database for many of its SAP clients.

The majority of their SAP customers leverage their third-party support offering – which is comprised of software break fixes, tax and regulatory updates, general inquiry support, and a range of technology advisory services designed to ensure interoperability in dynamic environments, application security, and virtualization. Most customers embrace their support engineers as a part of their own internal IT team and trust their independent guidance regarding goforward initiatives for cloud migration, transformation, and digitalization.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained SAP is increasingly using audits and indirect access as tactics to optimize revenue and retain support customers.

They have also modified their standard licensing agreements, which can complicate the cancellation process.

Spinnaker Support engages independent partners to help SAP users navigate through these barriers. SAP’s push to the cloud, which is widely regarded as not ready for prime time, can complicate transitions to thirdparty support as well – but often serves as a push to an alternative support model.

The best-laid plans Industry analysts agree that cloud-first thinking will continue to dominate IT

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executive strategies but most SAP users are waiting for SAP cloud offerings to further materialize. This could take years. So, those same analysts project that the third-party support market will remain a strong support alternative to enable the long-term vision at least through 2030.

Spinnaker Support offers a smart range of managed services and consulting.

Organizations that run SAP are seeking that single vendor to provide more services – to reduce costs and to shrink the number of service providers they are using today which is offered by Spinnaker Support.

Spinnaker Support is signing new partnerships to supplement their capabilities in emerging areas like application security, performance monitoring and tuning, and cloud/SaaS support. Database optimization is a key area where they will continue to invest.

The more robust their service capabilities, the better they will compete and win going forward. Their service mix will morph over time but their commitment to delivering expert service will not.

Experts on the cutting edge of SAP Spinnaker Support has hired experts who are on the cutting edge of SAP and surrounding stack technology. The cloud isn’t ready for the vast majority of SAP shops and they are looking to vendors like Spinnaker Support for cost savings that can help fund the cloud when it is ready and also to

coach and advise them on the best path to the cloud. They are experts in this field and stay abreast of the latest and greatest to ensure that they are top of mind for SAP users.

Integrating all essential parameters to be competent Firstly, Spinnaker Support focuses on providing unique, high value services to current SAP customers which retain them and makes them referenceable.

Secondly, Spinnaker Support is increasingly communicating with prospects, industry influencers from analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester, and with the IT journalist community. Awareness and education is a key ingredient to their success.

Thirdly, Spinnaker Support is expanding into emerging markets. Last year they launched an operation in Israel, a highrowth area for third-party support. In 2017, they have opened operations in strategic markets such as South Korea and Russia.

Finally, Spinnaker Support always delivers support the right way – avoiding the violation of the intellectual property rights of others.

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Xpandion: Ongoing Improvement of the SAP System Transformation of Xpandion from 2007 Xpandion was founded in 2007. It’s been 10 years that the company is fundamentally providing user access control in a unified cloud and on-premises environment, controlling ERP security and authorizations, optimizing SAP licensing, and along with it is easily maintaining GRC and Segregation of Duties (SoD) compliance.

Xpandion is a fair and responsive employer who respects their employee’s needs and provides them with a safe and enjoyable workplace.

Moshe Panzer Founder & CEO

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very established company is disciplined by their good management, staff members and the implementation that has been executed at the right time in a perfect way. We often think of exactly how such companies raise values in the industries at such an early stage. Well, the only thing which we need to focus on is- Never Give Up! No matter how tough the path you come across or how much savings you put on a portal, one should always believe that a miracle will soon happen in your life. This is how the team at Xpandion dreamt off when they lit up an idea that enlightened the company with numerous clients.

Xpandion is a leading provider of ERP usage inspection solutions, delivering unprecedented real-time visibility into SAP and non-SAP systems, significantly improving security, optimizing licensing usage and enabling GRC/SOX compliance. Available in cloud or on-premises, Xpandion Profile Tailor™ Dynamics suite is implemented rapidly and does not require any changes for monitoring systems. They work hard to update their software consistently in order to keep up with the most current industry standards and the constant changes, including SoD, ISO and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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Xpandion is constantly investing time and resources in researching new technologies and incorporating them into the software. Xpandion software is mobile-friendly, supports in-memory capabilities for better performance and uses the newest development standards.

As one of the first companies to embrace cloud-technology for enterprise software, Xpandion offers both on-premises and a cloud-version of its software, giving customers the ability to choose the most suitable solution for their organization and to move between solutions according to their current and future business needs.

Xpandion’s approach to sales is a bit different than others. The company’s main motto is to give value to each of its customers and provide them ultimate satisfaction. This is the reason that in some cases, organizations will approach Xpandion and will receive advice on whether or not Xpandion’s product is a good fit for them.

Customer Care Makes Xpandion Unique Ideas are often one and the same, but

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SAP customers should understand what’s going on inside their systems and what their users are really doing – and we supply the software to do that!

being able to understand and solve customer issues and ultimately implement solutions makes the company shine even in the dark.

Xpandion, which is a leading company in the ERP industry, maintains its unique stature only because of the expert services and company management. Together with its partners globally, Xpandion provides software solutions for increasing SAP Security and controlling SAP Authorizations, which is also a strong infrastructure for performing multi-platform role redesign projects.

Later, they also started providing ProfileTailor License Auditor, which delivers real-time visibility of actual SAP license usage and simplifies licensing models, enabling better management of licenses and achieving full control of SAP usage.

LicenseAuditor also monitors usage of SAP software engines and recommends the right license for each one. Last but not least, LicenseAuditor monitors licensing risks like duplicate logins and Indirect access, which can result in high licensing costs if not treated before an audit.

Xpandion is also on the peak of the compliance market by providing ProfilesTailor GRC which enables compliance with GRC/SOX and SoD requirements, identifying violations on static and dynamic levels of granting authorizations to users, supporting authorization related processes and solving violations from SoD rules.

Xpandion's unique technology enables customers to find the best authorization

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role to grant to users in a matter of seconds, and to really solve SoD conflicts instead of just creating compensating controls.

Xpandion customers are at ease knowing that their products are certified by SAP and that they will continue to get value from Xpandion for years. Xpandion products hold two certifications in the SAP world – one for SAP ECC Netweaver and one for SAP S/4 HANA, which promises customers full support for their existing SAP products and also for their future ones. Xpandion is continuously in contact with SAP to ensure that the software is compliant with SAP's next steps and directions.

Not a boss, but a leader of Xpandion Moshe Panzer, Founder & CEO of Xpandion has over 20 years of impressive experience in the SAP industry and is recognized as an SAP expert. Moshe has also contributed his skillful knowledge to the position of Project Advisor and Project Leader for large private multinational corporations and small startups. Additionally, he was also a proud senior SAP consultant before commencing Xpandion in 2007.

Including Xpandion, Moshe diligently established three software companies.

Having graduated from the Technion and Clark University, Moshe strongly believes that he has an ability to improve the lives of people through software solutions. This keeps him charged to develop more software and to help numerous individuals and organizations. Moshe restlessly looks to forage those organizations that are still working manually on those tasks

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which could be easily executed with a few clicks of the mouse and having the intelligent software behind the scenes doing all the hard work.

Sharpening on Future Challenges Xpandion is persistently working on their development to self-upgrade the system through planned changes and updating its applications with the changes in the industry. Xpandion’s software uniquely operates inside customer’s premises on a private cloud or in a secured public cloud as well.

Due to customer requests, the software supports multiple SAP products, including SAP Business Objects and SAP Success Factors, and also non-SAP products like Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, Infor M3, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Navision and SalesForce.

The company also aims to provide the best services and develop the best product for each of their clients. They are methodical, diligent and attentive to the small details. This gives an organization the ability to upgrade their core software easily as well as continuously acquire new features and capabilities. Xpandion and its partners provide a great customized solution with impeccable services and this is what makes them unique from the competitors in the industry.

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