Welcome to... TechEd.
-TechEd. TechEd 2021. 48 hours full of content.
Could this be any better? This only happens once a year,
where we’re all together like this. It’s a very exciting opportunity
to learn more about SAP products. And network with some amazing people. The over 100 skill-building
workshops this year... TechEd is the place to be. Hey, it is Sunday afternoon.
And I’m almost ready to be picked up by my Uber driver. And then I will go to Frankfurt,
where the TechEd shooting will happen. Looking forward to it. Hello and welcome to TechEd 2021. Welcome to our TechEd home. I hope that you are well,
and that your loved ones are well too. This will be our second
virtual TechEd experience. And I’m very excited that you have tuned in. Many of you told us
that you loved Channel 1. So did I. I kept my iPad on for almost 48 hours. TechEd was the first thing in the morning,
and the last thing in the evening. One of our community members
summarized it very well last year: He said, "I don’t think SAP has any idea of the impact this TechEd
will have on the ecosystem. And this is just begging for a repeat in 2021," in brackets,
"With some slight improvements, please." And that is exactly what we are doing. We are keeping the 48-hour
non-stop streaming format. And we are raising the bar
even higher this year. We have more live Q&As.
We have more opportunities to network. And we have 40% of sessions
including customers and partners. Because when customers share their stories
of how our technology has helped them solve their real business problems, this is so powerful. And there’s so much going on right now
in the SAP ecosystem. Economies are slowly reopening
in many parts of the world. Customers are turning to us and to our partners to help them get back on track
and become more resilient in the future. We are happy that we can actually support
our customers in so many ways. During last year I had the pleasure
of virtually meeting so many of them and learning more about their challenges
and how we can help solving them. From scaling rapidly in the pandemic,
to becoming carbon neutral, to managing supply chain disruptions, to running their business
in a more data-driven way. Many leaders have again
realized how important it is that processes within a company help people
to get their job done in the best possible way. Our commitment is to support all companies
and institutions to manage their business. And when executed well, we call the result an intelligent sustainable enterprise. Over and over, I hear that our customers
are happy that they turned to SAP and the SAP ecosystem. Yes, we are the market leader
for enterprise application software. And together with our
great partner ecosystem and the community we help companies
manage their processes end-to-end. How do we do that? First, with our business applications. For example, in the areas of finance,
supply chain, procurement HR, and customer experience. And secondly, through our now fully established, unified, business-centric and open SAP Business
Technology Platform. And this BTP is the foundation
that brings together all SAP applications and partner applications. It also helps many, many customers
with addressing repetitive challenges in the areas of data management and databases,
of planning and analytics, of integration and extension capabilities,
and many, many more. We embed our technologies in our applications and allow you to use them
beyond those applications as well. And today I’m super excited to share that we are offering the free tier model
for SAP Business Technology Platform. We started by offering it
to our customers and existing partners. And from today on,
it is also available to individual developers. So now you can discover and experience
SAP Business Technology Platform services without any financial commitment. This has been a journey
that many of you have followed very closely. You shared feedback,
you contributed actively to this milestone. And I really want to thank you for that. For me, this is the true power
of a functioning community. And I hope that it also shows you
that you can trust us. We are listening, and we are acting. We will share many, many more details
around free tier and many other exciting topics later on in this keynote. In my role as CTO of SAP,
many people ask me what is top-of-mind for me. And of course there are always
a lot of operational topics going on. But more strategically, I see three main
challenges the world is facing right now. First and foremost, the pandemic. The pandemic is still raging
in many parts of the world. And it continues to be a global health
and also an economic crisis. Production delays
and global chip shortages for example, are a direct consequence of the pandemic. And that put many industries to a halt. This effect currently gets amplified
by shipping container shortages. And that of course
causes new supply chain disruptions as well. Once again, it shows how interdependent
and vulnerable our systems are. It’s clear that disrupted supply chains are a new challenge
for businesses and consumers alike. The pandemic also accelerated
the digital transformation. It put a lot of pressure on business leaders
to now move to the Cloud. Why is that so important? Because, in the Cloud,
this is the place where to innovate at scale and with the speed necessary to react fast, you also can adapt business models,
if necessary, much quicker. And, for many,
this transition is not an easy task. And a lot of our customers and other companies’
customers face very specific challenges. For example, how to bring an old on-premise
ERP system, heavily modified, to the Cloud. And that while working towards a clean core. But even more threatening than
the pandemic is the topic of climate change. That is the second challenge. And saving our planet, the only planet we have,
is the<i> </i>challenge of our times. We all can, and should,
drive change, small and big, to actively contribute to a better,
more peaceful, more sustainable future. We cannot only rely on governments
to take care of this. Companies, with their employees,
need to lead by example as well. How can we reinvent the global economy
to meet our 1.5 degree target? We really need to re-think. How can we make products?
How do we deliver services? How do we consume? How do we deal with waste?
How do we use technology for all of that? And the third big challenge I see is inequality. It is dividing people.
It’s causing social unrest all around the world. And the root of it all, I believe, is that
there is an inequality of opportunities. So how do we enable everyone
to develop the right skills, giving all people a fair chance
to work where they fit best? And with every company now becoming
a tech company, this is even more important. All companies are now looking
for tech professionals. Forrester predict that the US alone
will have a deficit of roughly half a million software developers by 2024. So a huge technology talent gap
is opening up that needs to be filled. And that means, on the one hand,
we do have people with unequal opportunities. And on the other hand, we have
very high demand for a skilled workforce. Of course, basic needs need to be tackled first. But we also thought about,
what can SAP do about it? And among many other things SAP is doing,
we can give open access to learning resources. And we can provide No-Code solutions
as another way out of this dilemma. So now let’s have a look at how we can help you
tackle some of these problems. We have experienced a lot of disruption recently that potentially has changed
our lives forever already, sometimes also in a good way. Everyone now knows that
the place to innovate at scale and to build resiliency is in the Cloud. And that is why we launched
our RISE With SAP offering earlier this year. With S/4HANA in its center,
it provides a transition path to the Cloud. Everyone in our customer and partner base understands that SAP S/4HANA
is the goal for ERP. And regarding extensions and integrations,
they will happen with SAP BTP to keep a clean core. Many companies and institutions
have already arrived at S/4HANA. And everyone else will go there. And with this demand for SAP
really exploding in our ecosystem, it is really an exciting place
to be right now in the SAP realm. It’s a true movement, and you haven’t heard me saying that,
but really it is a true movement. And because there’s so much
demand around SAP right now, we want to make sure that we take you along,
as developers, on that journey. This also means that we want
to fully equip you to develop in the Cloud. S/4HANA Cloud already offers
Low-Code/No-Code key user extensibility as well as rich
side-by-side extensibility on BTP. But there’s something in the middle. When looking at our S/4HANA, our Cloud
offering from a developer perspective, you might still ask: how can I build tightly coupled
S/4HANA extensions in a managed system? In some cases, you might still prefer to develop
extensions directly within the S/4HANA system. But of course, you want to keep the core clean. One example is
if you want to implement additional checks. Or if you want to trigger updates that need to
be carried out within one logical unit of work. And in those scenarios, you will also want
to take full advantage of your IDE. Now we are closing this
last gap between on-premise and in the Cloud by offering a new truly Cloud ready ABAP
environment directly inside S/4HANA Cloud. The official name is SAP S/4HANA
Cloud ABAP environment. Since it is derived
from the SAP BTP ABAP environment, which you already know,
this one is known as Steampunk. Most other developers
would probably refer to the new offering as Embedded Steampunk. It is available in the Public Cloud
for selected customers with RISE with SAP
in S/4HANA Cloud 2108 edition. Now, let’s actually hear
from a professional ABAP developer what the S/4HANA Cloud
ABAP environment is all about. Rich Heilman is already here in this building. He is preparing the developer keynote,
which will take place tomorrow. And I asked Rich to join me here
on stage for a moment. Rich, welcome. Hi, Juergen.
-Hey, good having you. Thanks for having me.
-Hundred percent. Rich, you are a long term ABAP developer. You are a developer advocate. You are well known in the ABAP community
and beyond. From your perspective, can you explain us what the new S/4HANA Cloud
ABAP environment is about and how it also differentiates between the classical ABAP environment?
-Sure, happy to. So, with embedded Steampunk,
this allows me to build custom ABAP on S/4HANA Public Cloud system. So, I’m really in the S/4 stack here,
not side by side. I can directly select data
from S/4 database tables using S/4 CDS views,
or I can call a local S/4 API. This way, I can build tightly coupled
extensions, which cannot run side by side. But, be aware, this is not
the classic freestyle ABAP that you know from on-premise. OK, Rich, so you tell me I can
get the best of the ABAP world plus I can do it in a Cloud manner such that when I build something,
following the new ABAP model, then if I upgrade the system, the extensions will not break.
-Exactly. So, in the Cloud, extensions
and SAP code must clearly be separated to allow seamless SAP software updates. So, no more modifications
of SAP code are allowed and you can only use released
SAP APIs in your custom ABAP code Makes a lot of sense. Rich, I saw you were working on something
earlier that looked very interesting. Can you show us? Yeah, sure. So I was playing around
with the new sales order APIs in Embedded Steampunk while preparing for
my demo for tomorrow’s developer keynote. So, as you can see, it’s still ABAP. I have a simple Z class here, but now I don’t call
the old sales order function modules, instead, I use a public RAP APIs
which have been released by SAP. And for the ABAP experts out there, perhaps you’ve seen
the modified entity statements and how nicely the new API,
and really RAP itself, is integrated into the ABAP language. And for the non ABAP experts, Rich, RAP is the ABAP RESTful
Application Programming Model, right? That’s right. RAP is the modern
programming model in ABAP for building Fiori apps and services. So, in Embedded Steampunk,
we no longer build DIN Pro or web DIN Pro applications. Nice. And now I’m super curious.
So, how does it actually work? How do those new S/4HANA Cloud extensions work? So actually, this is part of my demo tomorrow. I’m going to show how to use Embedded Steampunk to adapt an SAP process
by implementing a BAdI extension point. So, I’d ask you to stay tuned for that
and attend the developer keynote tomorrow. Rich, I will do that. Sounds great.
Thanks for having you here. Thanks, Juergen.
-Thanks a lot. This was great to see. So, if you are interested
in any of the great topics in the developer keynote
and/or the S/4HANA-centric extensions with the new S/4HANA Cloud ABAP environment,
do not miss the developer keynote tomorrow. And we will go even further with that. We want to make as S/4HANA Cloud
ABAP environment the environment to build tightly coupled extensions
for all S/4HANA Cloud editions based on the Public Cloud APIs. This will help you to build,
upgrade, safe extensions, move towards a clean core. And it closes the last extension gap
in S/4HANA Cloud to ease the transition
from on-premise to the Cloud. Now we have key user in-app extensibility. We have the S/4HANA ABAP environment
and we have the BTP side extensions in ABAP or many other programming languages. I hope that this resonated well with all of you in the pro code development space,
ABAP development community. And, as I mentioned,
this is closing the last gap and it makes the journey
to S/4HANA Cloud even easier. Now, let’s look at another topic
you wanted us to focus on. You asked us to lower the entry barrier
for SAP Business Technology Platform. So, a year ago at TechEd,
I promised that we were going to enable a free tier model for SAP BTP. And, over the course of the year,
we have made free tier available to existing customers, to existing partners, and then now also to individual developers. And I’m happy to announce
that we made new additions as well. The SAP Integration Suite is now
part of the free tier plan too. And we also added SAP HANA Cloud. And for this topic, I’m actually excited to have
a special guest here with me today. Let’s welcome Steffen Pietsch. Steffen, glad having you.
-Happy to be here. Thank you for having me. We have a little bit of a history
with this topic. Steffen really pushed me, pushed us
very hard on the topic of free tier. Of course, there were also many other
voices from the community on this topic. But, Steffen, why was that? Well, I did push for the free tier
because it is such an important topic. And let’s maybe clarify, back then, a year ago, when we, for example,
discussed that topic very heavily, you were the CTO
of the German-speaking SAP user group. You were asking for free tier.
Now, Steffen, time changed, things changed, you are with SAP now, we have free tier. What do you say now? Well, for me, it is a game changer
because developers can now build their proof of concepts
on SAP BTP without any commitment. And if they then decide to move their
applications towards productive usage, they can simply do so by changing from the free to the productive service plan. And this without rebuilding the entire
application in a different account. So, at the end of the day,
free tier means that it is much easier to gain experience
and to start to innovate with SAP BTP because there is no initial financial commitment for an increasing number of use cases. So, customers can easily evaluate
which services and use cases can add value to their business, and also how. Makes a lot of sense. And that is why we are also continuously adding
more and more services to the free tier plan. And now, I guess, Steffen,
for all the makers out there, the question is, how can I get started? Where can I get started? Well, first of all, you want to make
sure that you learn the basics about the SAP BTP capabilities
and the SAP BTP cockpit, of course. For this, I would really recommend
our different learning offerings. Actually, that’s good because I will talk
about learning later on in more detail. Perfect. And then for anyone who’s ready to experiment with the services
available on the free tier plan, the best place to get started
is our SAP Discovery Center. Here, you can find a service catalogue
with the list of all services available on SAP BTP. And in the category free tier services, you can check out all the services which
are already available with free tier. That sounds very helpful. Do you have a concrete use case, anything you want to share with us, if I now want to start with that?
-Sure. For instance, when you select mobile services, you can also find related missions. Among the many options, I recommend
starting with the rather simple and quick mission called empowering field technicians
by building native apps using SD case. This mission describes
how to improve employee productivity in remote work settings
with mobile apps for iOS and for Android. And these apps help to better schedule
tasks, manage sales orders and integrate these activities with inventory
and other back office systems. And my colleagues Nis Boy and Max just very recently published a great blog post where they use this mission
to outline how to find free tier content, how to adjust missions to your very own needs, and how to make use of free tier
service plans in the SAP BTP cockpit. So, make really sure you check it out. Yeah, actually, I did check out
that blog post this morning. Very helpful. We will also share
the link in the comments section. For anyone who doesn’t
have a SAP BTP global account yet or just a trial account, there is a link to the SAP store
where you can sign up for an SAP BTP global account
with pay as you go agreement, giving you access to free tier
and to paid service plans. And that is actually
a huge thing, completely new. You can now go to the store,
you can sign up for pay as you go. You don’t have to give any pre-commitment and you have access
to all the free tier services And then we learned, the Discovery Center can really help to get an overview
and provide great guidance. What do we have to do in my BTP account to somehow activate,
enable the free tier services? Yeah. So basically you need to enable
the services on the free tier plan before creating and using the services,
which is pretty straightforward. And Max shows that in depth
in the blog post video. Sounds easy, Steffen,
but let’s say I’m a customer, partner, an individual developer,
and I’m excited about the integration suite, which is not also part of the free tier. Also for that, would I find information
on the Discovery Center? Absolutely. So check out the missions
related to the integration suite to get some first ideas for use cases. The missions then provide
step by step guidance on how to extend your existing SAP system landscape with services available on the free tier plan. And once you are able
to prove the business value, you can then easily switch to productive usage. Nice. That’s very good. I have to ask though, is there any reason
why I should not use the free tier? No, no small print. I can really recommend
everyone to get started today. That is amazing. OK, so let’s do that. I hope you will all check the free tier out. Free tier is now available
for individual developers, as well as for partners
and for existing customers. Steffen, thank you so much. Nice having you here. You’re very welcome. And, as you know,
I’m very passionate about that topic and I’m really looking forward
to the community feedback so that we can continuously improve further. 100%. Steffen, thank you so much. See you later.
-Thanks, Juergen. Happy to see you. So, you asked us to make it easier for you to get started with SAP BTP,
and I believe we have done that now. And it just gets better. You have heard me saying that we want to create a future where SAP caters for everyone, from the Cloud native developer
to the data scientist to the enterprise architect,
to the application and integration developer, and to the UX designer
and even non-technical users. Because all of these personas
can have something in common, they can be makers and they can help the world with the largest challenges
we discussed earlier today. That’s why I’m thrilled to share that, next
to our continued investment in pro code, we have been doubling down into our investment with Low-Code and No-Code tools
for citizen developers. And today you’ll see some of those results because we are launching
a unified Low-Code/No-Code experience on SAP Business Technology Platform citizen and professional developers alike can now increase their productivity
and innovate at scale. So, what is in it for you? First of all, we introduced
SAP AppGyver for No-Code development. Second, we evolve
the SAP Business Application Studio and make it available
for Low-Code development now. And third, we are launching a preview of our new No-Code Automation solution,
SAP Process Automation, which builds on the capabilities
of our known robotic process automation and workflow capabilities. With this unified Low-Code/No-Code offering, we bridged the gap between professional
and non-technical developers. For example, in the Business Applications
Studio, professional developers can support citizen developers
wherever they are needed. And actually, I have
two special guests here with me. We have Marko. Marko, you are the founder
of AppGyver, now leading the SAP AppGyver team,
and Diana, you and the team, you are taking care
of Low-Code/No-Code solutions at SAP. Hi, it’s great to be here.
-Hello. Thanks for having me. Nice having you. Marko, let’s start with you. You are a developer by heart,
but also you are fully behind No-Code. What’s the deal? Well, when I was a kid,
we used to write machine code to create software and talk to the computers. And we’ve seen the evolution
of programming languages over the decades. And now we’re at the verge
of something very big, with visual programming
being the next step in the evolution. People used to think about No-Code in terms of being something that you use to create
baby apps and small software. With SAP AppGyver, we are really pushing
the limits of what No-Code can do. You can create mission critical pixel
perfect solutions without any writing of code. It’s really big.
-Nice. That’s exciting to hear. Diana, what do you see happening? I actually brought a demo
to show you how it works. Sure.
-So, I’ll show you the demo. It’s about a customer service
issue and a company called AirX. AirX manufactures heating and cooling systems. In this demo, I’m a non-technical user
and I’m responsible for customer satisfaction.
So, let me get started. I start in SAP WorkZone. I’ve created my own personal
digital experience, which displays all information and connects
to all applications I need. I can approve open items
and review my business KPIs from various systems in one central page. Let me approve my incoming requests first. Everything’s looking good.
All important items are cleared. I know that there was an issue
with our call centers recently. So, let me look into my process
visibility dashboard. I can see that 99% of processes
are completed within 24 hours. I can also see that
our customer satisfaction is up. Great. Really thrilled to see this. Up until last week, we were receiving
lots of negative feedback from customers. Many of them were unsatisfied
with the way we were managing the request for replacement parts. They reported mistakes and delays. Thanks to SAP Process Insights,
we were able to identify two reasons for this problem. First, order entry errors due to multiple
screens and having to cut and paste numbers. Second, slower approvals of orders
due to manual processes via email. The problem was urgent, of course,
and we needed to solve it right away, but we had low resources
from our central I.T. department. So, let me show you now how we solved
it anyways within one week’s time. Before you do that, Diana,
actually, that happens so often. IT departments are just overloaded
with too many projects and requests and that’s also why
no pro code development needs to fear this Low-Code/No-Code movement
because there’s just so much to do, and we just want to enable
more people to get things done. Yeah, and these kinds of scenarios
are very common at our customers and yet very easy to solve with No-Code. Diana, you want to show what we solved? Marko, why don’t you
show us the next part of the demo? Sure thing. So, first of all, we wanted
to help our service agents work more efficiently when they order
replacement parts for customers. The journey starts in our Unified
Development Project Overview By creating a new project with SAP AppGyver.
Using the SAP AppGyver composer, I designed the on-screen interface
of an app which allows our agents to order replace AC products
directly from the service Cloud. The drag and drop controls and data fields
from the Component Library made it easy to create a straightforward UI, which is simple to operate
and leaves little room for mistakes. I then use the SAP AppGyver
backend capabilities to connect the app with S/4HANA, and this allowed me
to fetch customers’ equipment information and we also wanted to integrate
external data from our vendors to make sure that we only ordered
spare parts that were in the stock. And, for this, we typically need support from
someone with more technical understanding. Therefore, for this demo scenario,
we had our colleagues from IT help create a new data model that would fetch the inventory and pricing
data from our spare parts vendor. Thanks to the new Low-Code experience in BaS, this service was created in just a few hours. I then leveraged the new data
model for my service app. That, Marko, I like so much because you have
development and business in the company working very closely together,
and I think that makes a huge difference. Exactly. And, just like that, we built an extension into SAP Service Cloud, which allows service agents to assist
customers without ever switching screens, everything they need is within one window now. Nice. Nice. Marko, who actually are those users?
What do you see? Who is using those No-Code tools? Well, that’s an excellent question
because basically it involves everybody. You have designers
who used to create just prototypes now being able to pull further
and create full applications. You have business people who have zero technical
background being able to create software. And of course, you have the professional
developers with a lot of experience in coding now being able to create so much larger
pieces of software thanks to the No-Code. Nice. Diana, when you showed
the demo earlier to me, there was a second part to it
about approvals, workflow. Yes, yes. I’m happy to show it to you. So... We made our service agents
more efficient thanks to Marko. We also needed to speed up
the approval process and management site. We used SAP process automation
to build an approval workflow, which is connected to
the service Cloud app that we just saw. First, I set a trigger
to initiate the approval workflow. Every time a new spare part
is requested through the app, the process will start. The second option is a request through email. I added an additional trigger,
which leverages an RPA bot that then automatically extracts
the data from the emails. Lastly, we also wanted to give
customers the option to request spare parts online through a form. I built the form in SAP Process Automation
using the drag and drop UI and connected to the process. We also added a rule. Approvals are only needed
if spare parts cost more than 50 euros. I then added some business logic to my process to automatically determine
the approval of the request. I added a policy
and configured a decision table. This will determine the responsible approver. And, finally, I also wanted to make the approval even more seamless by providing
decision support for managers, leveraging AI business services
and configure the scenario, which generates the confidence level and will assist managers
to approve requests even faster. I’m able to do so without support from
my team or data scientist, and that’s it. Now we can deploy the new approval
workflow with just a few clicks. And this is how we were able to solve our problems in customer service
in just one week’s time. I can approve my incoming requests now quickly and based on machine
learning supported recommendations. Diana, Marko, that is very rich, very full, I hope everyone is excited
about those new opportunities. Thank you so much. But I have one more question before
actually we go to the audience. Marko, now actually, you joined SAP and the AppGyver team joined SAP, welcome again. Which opportunities
do you see in the SAP ecosystem? Well, Low-Code/No-Code on Business
Technology Platform really champions change and maximizes
the value for existing investments. With SAP AppGyver, you can really have
super powers to create multi-platform apps and extensions so much faster
than ever before. It’s thrilling. So, you really say,
Low-Code/No-Code development opportunities are now available for many, many more people than if you have
a computer science degree and can code. Yeah?
-Yeah, definitely. I mean, with this solution, we are making programming
effectively available for everybody. So, every single person
can create their own software. It’s incredible. Diana, what’s your point of view? I absolutely agree. What I do want to add is that people often think
with Low-Code/No-Code, it’s so easy, you don’t have to learn anything,
and it’s not true. I mean, every new tool learns,
need some upskilling, right? At SAP, we are of the firm belief
that we need to make it as easy as possible for non-technical end users. And we’re super happy to have
in-product learning experience in AppGyver. And we also launch a new learning
offering today to make it easy for non-technical users to understand
what application development and citizen development
is actually all about. Diana, Marko, now I let you go,
enjoy TechEd and thanks so much again. Thank you. Thank you. Actually, I hope that some of this can remove some of the inequality
in the world we talked earlier about. Just think about it. SAP alone has more than
230 million end users of our Cloud applications. And there are a lot more
when you include our on-premise systems. And now imagine that we can
show all those end users a path to becoming a citizen developer. I am already looking forward
to seeing someone, maybe an hourly worker, and she or he extend an SAP system,
for example, with SAP AppGyver. This can unlock a new order
of magnitude of value creation for that individual person, of course,
but also for society as a whole. And that actually can help
closing the skill gap we have too. So, if you want that, if you want to become
a citizen developer, just have a look at our new Low-Code, No-Code learning
journey on learning.sap.com. Actually, we just launched
a new learning experience today. So, let me show you. This new learning experience
is designed for all developer skill levels, being it a pro-code developer,
being it an IT professional, being it an academic student,
a technology thought leader. It’s a completely new way
to accessing SAP-specific knowhow. So, going forward, all makers, you can learn all necessary skills by taking free of charge learning journeys, you can qualify yourself for SAP certifications. In the past, you had to pay
for this learning content. Now, you can access it for free. We follow the path
that we have started very successfully with open SAP, but now even more consequently, as of today,
we are starting this new learning approach with seven different
BTP-specific learning journeys. More will follow soon. For example, the one we just mentioned, Low-Code/No-Code
and citizen development journey. I just mentioned that one, it teaches you the basic concepts
of software development in a few hours. And then you can build
your own app in just 30 minutes. You can become a trusted expert with certified skills,
and that has never been easier. All in one place. Also, with easy navigation
to other learning offerings like SAP Learning Hub, like open SAP and like the SAP community. And, to further support career
opportunities, we are also establishing a partnership with
the California-based startup, Placement. Let’s roll a short video. Hi, I’m Sean Linehan,
Placement’s co-founder and CEO. We’re a proud partner of SAP Learning. Take advantage of SAP certificates and placement’s career coaching
to go farther, faster in your career. Our career coaches are standing by waiting to help you unlock
your full career potential. We actually have a special TechEd offer for you, so you can take full advantage
of the services offered by Placement. The first 1000 developers
to complete a certification exam on the SAP Business Technology Platform
through the new learning site will receive a voucher worth $125 that you can use for career
development services like coaching. So, you have heard me talking
about the intelligent enterprise, about SAP Business Technology Platform, about free tier, about Low-Code,
No-Code and about learning. How about a quick summary?
For that, let me hand over to Vivian Boche. We just talked about many different things that are key to run a business,
but how does it fit together? And, more importantly, why should you care?
Let’s start at the beginning. What is an intelligent enterprise?
An intelligent enterprise uses advanced tech and best practices to run more agile, more profitable,
more resilient and sustainable. How does an intelligent enterprise look like? A key part of our strategy
is the integration of business applications alongside end to end processes. It consists of various different parts. For example, a business network,
sustainability solutions and a multiple infrastructure approach
for your company. How do we do this? With our intelligent
suite of business applications, we help you to manage
every part of your organization, from employees to customers,
product and finance, and more. Where do these apps run? On SAP
Business Technology Platform. What is this? SAP BTP offers technologies reaching from analytics, data management,
app development, over to AI and much more, so you can easily
integrate, extend, gain value from data and innovate all in one place. How can you try SAP BTP? SAP BTP free tier enables you to test
and tinker the different SAP BTP services. And, when you’re ready,
you can easily bring your ideas into reality. So, how can you learn how to use all of this? With this new learning side, everything is centralized
in one place, and you can start now. What can you learn? For example, try out
our new Low-Code/No-Code learning journey. Why should you care about any of this? You need to identify quickly changing
customer and market demands, generate real time insights from your data,
adjust processes and business models faster. We give you all the pieces to the puzzle. You need to become an intelligent enterprise and we stand strong on your side,
on your way into the Cloud. Now, it’s up to you what you make out of it. Over to you, Juergen. As you saw, Vivian
experimented with a new format. I hope you like it. I know that Vivian has prepared quite
a few more such TikTok-style videos. Make sure to check them out
on our SAP Community BTP page. Vivian closed with, "Now it is up to you what you
make out of it," and I like that. And, in fact, more and more
customers are choosing the SAP Business Technology Platform. Our platform capabilities in combination
with SAP applications are second to none. More than 12,000 Cloud customers
are already live on SAP BTP. And, in addition, over 4000 partners
are engaged to build with SAP too. If you look on roadmaps.sap.com,
since the last TechEd until now, you find more than 1,100 delivered roadmap items for SAP Business Technology Platform alone. Among those are roughly 140 roadmap items
just for AI and our SAP Integration Suite. Among them, further improved monitoring
capabilities for integration scenarios. The SAP Business Technology Platform is the foundation
for the intelligent enterprise. We already talked about extensions, but the BTP also empowers you to use
your data to derive actionable insights with SAP HANA Cloud,
Data Warehouse Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud. Customers are constantly adapting
to heterogeneous data landscapes and really increasing legal, security,
regulatory risks related to data. Complex and fragmented
data landscapes are a huge challenge. If you want to gain real time
insights in a compliant way. And this is where SAP is able to help. With business solutions, for financial insights, for workforce
planning and many, many more. And, of course, in addition,
SAP can provide you with the tools to use your SAP data
plus third party data to analyze the past, based on that, predict the future. But often this prediction
is not where you want to be. So, therefore, planning is so important
such that you end up where you want to be. One very nice example of a company
using multiple of our solutions in their journey is our customer Porsche. I’m very happy to
have Lennart Allzeit with me today. As an expert for corporate finance
and treasury at Porsche, Lennart is responsible
for financial management and risk strategy within the Treasury Department.
I hope I got that right. That’s absolutely correct. It’s a pleasure to be with you today
and introduce our treasury case. Nice having you, Lennart.
The latest project you realized, I learned, at Porsche is the Porsche
Treasury and Reporting System. We are mostly non-finance people. Can you explain to us what this means? Absolutely. I’ll try to keep it crisp. So, in order to foresee potential chances
that arise from an excess of liquidity and, on the other hand,
to evaluate risks that arise from a shortage of liquidity,
we plan our group’s net liquidity. So, within the Porsche Group,
three times per month. Doing so, we can guarantee that we meet our financial obligations
and stay solvent at any time. This process includes around 70 major
subsidiaries within the Porsche Group, ranging from importers to dealers, service companies, design companies, etc. So it is really not
the typical Porsche subsidiary in place. This process, especially during the corona
pandemic, proved to be very helpful in order to better plan our liquidity. OK, so I understand
you have to manage different parties and I also learned that SAP BW and SAP Analytics Cloud help you in doing that, How do those solutions help you?
-Absolutely. In the past, this liquidity
planning process has been manual, so it was a lot of manual effort
that went into it. The subsidiary started plugging in
their numbers into Excel files, then circulating them by email to us. It was then up on us to consolidate them
in an ever-growing Excel, as you can imagine. It was just very susceptible
to manual errors to keep it short. Now, with the introduction of PTRS,
this entire process changed completely. Everything is now within the system,
within a single system. There is no need for any email communication, to send around Excel files and whatsoever. The system is available 24/7, that means when the colleagues
in Australia or Asia get up, they can start working right away
without having to wait on us. We have a lot of different dashboard
solutions in place, which really bring up some key KPIs for us that
were previously simply hidden in the Excel, and we have
a very smart access control in place. As you can imagine,
it’s very hard, if you only circulate mails, to really double check
who has access on which data. So, that really was a tremendous change for us. It really sounds that this process
got a lot of positive change. Often the challenge is also
to taking the people along. How did you handle that? Absolutely.
That was a key challenge for us, Juergen. Many people were working
with the old Excel system for a decade or even more, and they didn’t
really see the need for any change. So it was really on us
to bring awareness that there’s actually a necessity for change. And it also brings me to my second point, which is taking away
the fear of this change, right? And we managed to do so by advertising
the advantages of the system like, for example, less manual entry needed through the use of interfaces,
the possibility to create your own dashboards. And that really helped us to break the ice and make a better step
also for the subsidiaries. The last big point
I want to highlight, as I mentioned earlier, there’s not the typical Porsche subsidiary,
so it was really not easy to find the balance and the balanced
layout that would, on the one hand, bolster the performance
of the existing big companies, while, on the other hand, not adding too
much complexity for the small companies who might not have a dedicated
Treasury Department in place. That was a challenge. Well, it sounds that you and the team,
you managed that very nicely. Are there any future plans
on top of this PTRS system? Thank you very much, Juergen.
Yes, one of the key challenges is now, since it’s not only within Porsche,
but within the entire Volkswagen Group. Many different departments
currently evaluate the possibility to use SAP Analytics Cloud and not only from a pure reporting perspective,
but also as a planning case as we do. So, it would be really a challenge for us, and we look forward to doing that, to connect those dots
from a treasury perspective to get an even broader overview. That’s exciting to hear.
Lennart, thank you very much. Thanks for sharing those insights
and this liquidity treasury use case. I look forward to many more
joint projects. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much, Juergen. It’s a pleasure. That was such a great example
of how you can improve your liquidity planning when you consolidate
everything into one system. Taking this one step further,
it becomes clear why cross-company planning is so important
because any decision you take for one business area
has ripple effects on the others. Porsche has an ambitious goal to make
the whole value chain carbon neutral by 2030. Now, imagine what this means
with regard to planning. Which model can be produced until when?
Do I need new factories? How do I remodel existing factories? Where do I get the batteries from? Do I potentially need to buy another company? Do I need to do a strategic investment to secure certain resources,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? We have companies that want to answer
these and many other questions. But being able to do that requires that all relevant data sources are integrated and that the data and content
is available in real-time and across all lines
of businesses in the company. This is possible thanks to SAP HANA Cloud. Even if data is federated across
multiple sources, SAP and non-SAP. And there is more. By the end of this year
and beginning of next year, we have tens of thousands of SAP BW NetWeaver, SAP on HANA, SAP BW for HANA customers. Maybe you are one of them. And now, many of them have asked us, "Hey, SAP, can’t you provide us
an easier path to the Cloud?" And that is why I’m delighted to announce a new SAP Data Warehouse Cloud feature. It is called BW Bridge. It offers SAP BW capabilities natively in SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, like data integrations from SAP ECC and S/4HANA. And, for managing data loading, the BW bridge includes the enterprise
ready staging layers of SAP BW. And lastly, it was not possible
in the past to move existing custom ABAP logic and objects
to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. We will change that. Coming in Q1 ’22, we will offer a tool-supported
move of SAP BW-based integration and staging for BW customers. And again, it’s clear most of
the innovation will happen in the Cloud. And we will also help
all BW customers to get there. In the beginning, we talked about
how the pandemic accelerates the move to the Cloud,
and our BW customers mentioned these gaps as the largest impediment
to go to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. And we are also closing these gaps. And we and our partners are more than happy to work with our customers
to get to SAP Data Warehouse Cloud. Another advantage is that SAP Data
Warehouse Cloud is based on SAP HANA. And this brings a lot of advantages
from federated data access to extremely high speed and low TCO. I hope that, together with our guests, we were able to inspire you to learn more. With S/4HANA Cloud, our other Cloud solutions, as well as the Business Technology Platform,
we have generated this amazing wave of opportunities and growth
in the SAP ecosystem. And now all we need from you is to join in. And ideally, you bring in your friends,
your colleagues and others into the SAP ecosystem as well,
if they are not yet part of it. We are equipping you with the right tools
because we want you to be successful. And, of course,
we want to support your companies and your customers on the journey
to the intelligent enterprise. So if you are asking yourself now,
how can you get involved? Here’s a couple of things
I would like to recommend to you. First, join our SAP community
on community.sap.com. Here, you can also check out
our Low-Code/No-Code solutions. The SAP community in general
is the place to bring in new ideas to discuss with other experts
and share your feedback. This is also where you can address
topics that are top of mind for you, like the free tier model
for SAP Business Technology Platform, which brings me to
the second thing I would like you to do. Sign up for free tier on sap.com/btp. Explore and try out BTP services free
of charge without any financial commitment and build solutions
for the world’s most pressing problems. You can find great use cases
on the SAP Discovery Center. That will help you get started
being in the area of health, of sustainability,
of inequality or digitization. There are so many challenges
waiting to be resolved. And we also have reference
architectures to help you get started. With our new Low-Code/No-Code solutions, the door to innovation is wide open to everyone. And finally, make sure to visit
learning.sap.com to upskill and become a trusted expert
with our free learning offerings. Lifelong learning has never been easier. It is also an important pillar to create
more equal opportunities in the world. But, for now, let’s all enjoy TechEd. Make sure you stay tuned here
on Channel 1 for the upcoming live Q&A with my fellow executive board colleagues,
Julia White and Thomas Saueressig. And, tomorrow, of course,
do not miss the Developer Keynote as well as the closing show,
including a live Q&A with many of our Channel 1 experts. With that, there’s not much more
left for me to say than, SAP TechEd is an event for makers. SAP TechEd is made for you. As makers, you are the true enablers
of the intelligent enterprise. You bring the knowhow and experience or, if you don’t have it yet, you can learn it. We offer you the tools to innovate
and make the world run better. I hope you enjoy the rest of SAP TechEd. Stay well. Stay safe. All the best.
