Key Takeaways from SAP TechEd 2018

Another SAP TechEd 2018 Las Vegas is in the books and it delivered five days of education, training, networking, and fun. Topics included SAP HANA Data Management Suite, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Leonardo, SAP Analytics Cloud, and how real customers are building intelligent enterprises. Following up the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW Conference earlier this year, the main focus was the "Intelligent Enterprise". Expect to continue to hear this term from SAP and it's partners for the next several months and years.

New Cloud Business-Focused Development
SAP Cloud Platform, ABAP environment, now generally available, makes it easy for ABAP programmers to develop world-class app extensions as well as new apps using the public cloud. SAP Cloud Platform, ABAP environment, will empower programmers to use existing ABAP programming knowledge and skills to develop and extend critical business applications in the cloud using agile and DevOps methodologies and principles.

The cloud application programming model for SAP Cloud Platform is an integrated framework of tools, languages and libraries for developers to efficiently and rapidly build enterprise business services and applications. It will guide developers with SAP-supported best practices for full-stack cloud business application development so they can focus on their development project at hand. This includes:

• Integrating open source software and SAP technologies into one consistent end-to-end programming model and development experience
• Providing lightweight and modular implementation of core data services, allowing rapid development of persistency, business logic and user experience
• Guiding developers with a set of enterprise-grade tools, languages and libraries, allowing them to stay focused on their domain logic

SAP Data Hub
SAP Data Hub allows customers to build, execute, orchestrate and govern flow-based pipelines, providing the maximum reuse of existing data developments while encompassing digital innovations. Using an innovative metadata catalog and policy management, the solution provides a trusted metadata discovery, refinement and publishing environment. Users can easily extract more information and intelligence from highly distributed, diverse hybrid and multi-cloud environments to make real-time decisions and take immediate action without unnecessary data movement or consolidation.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Key Takeaways from SAP TechEd 2018

Another SAP TechEd 2018 Las Vegas is in the books and it delivered five days of education, training, networking, and fun. Topics included SAP HANA Data Management Suite, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Leonardo, SAP Analytics Cloud, and how real customers are building intelligent enterprises. Following up the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW Conference earlier this year, the main focus was the "Intelligent Enterprise". Expect to continue to hear this term from SAP and it's partners for the next several months and years.

New Cloud Business-Focused Development
SAP Cloud Platform, ABAP environment, now generally available, makes it easy for ABAP programmers to develop world-class app extensions as well as new apps using the public cloud. SAP Cloud Platform, ABAP environment, will empower programmers to use existing ABAP programming knowledge and skills to develop and extend critical business applications in the cloud using agile and DevOps methodologies and principles.

The cloud application programming model for SAP Cloud Platform is an integrated framework of tools, languages and libraries for developers to efficiently and rapidly build enterprise business services and applications. It will guide developers with SAP-supported best practices for full-stack cloud business application development so they can focus on their development project at hand. This includes:

• Integrating open source software and SAP technologies into one consistent end-to-end programming model and development experience
• Providing lightweight and modular implementation of core data services, allowing rapid development of persistency, business logic and user experience
• Guiding developers with a set of enterprise-grade tools, languages and libraries, allowing them to stay focused on their domain logic

SAP Data Hub
SAP Data Hub allows customers to build, execute, orchestrate and govern flow-based pipelines, providing the maximum reuse of existing data developments while encompassing digital innovations. Using an innovative metadata catalog and policy management, the solution provides a trusted metadata discovery, refinement and publishing environment. Users can easily extract more information and intelligence from highly distributed, diverse hybrid and multi-cloud environments to make real-time decisions and take immediate action without unnecessary data movement or consolidation.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Five Technologies Impacting Healthcare

Leading healthcare organizations investing in digital capabilities require a framework designed for change –one that supports new business strategies and ensures agility while delivering value-added patient services.

We are witnessing an unmatched era of digitally driven innovation. Breakthrough technologies have matured and hit scale together, which will change how we provide healthcare. A digital network solution is arising that blurs the lines between patient, professional, and provider for more responsive, patient-centric care. Five defining technology trends have already emerged which are powering this digital healthcare network according to SAP:

• CLOUD COMPUTING - Technology adoption and business innovation now move at lightning speed. Technology infrastructure can be rented to eliminate barriers to entry, and transactions among healthcare players are moving to new cloud-based collaboration platforms that can connect millions of users.
• SMARTER DEVICES - “Smart” devices, wearables, sensors, robotics, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence are the new normal. This technology can turn Big Data in healthcare into smart data, resulting in insights for clinical decisions relevant to each patient’s specific situation.
• HYPERCONNECTIVITY - Every patient, healthcare organization, and machine is connected –changing all the established rules for healthcare channels. Connectivity drives the collaboration of patients, providers, and supporting businesses and assets in the digital healthcare network.
• SUPER COMPUTING - Networking and in-memory computing allow for the creation of an infinite number of new business opportunities for the healthcare industry. For example, genome sequencing costs decrease even faster than Moore’s law.
• SECURITY - The digital healthcare network is a prime target for digital attacks and sabotage. Because trust remains the ultimate business currency, healthcare organizations must make cybersecurity a top priority in designing and operating a digital business network.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today...

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SAP Releases SAP S/4HANA 1809

SAP announced the latest version of SAP S/4HANA; SAP S/4HANA 1809. The latest release promises to continue on with SAP's commitment to both converting existing ECC functionality into S/4, as well as, introducing newer functions and features.

Here is an overview of SAP S/4HANA 1809 from sap.com

Innovations and Intelligence in SAP S/4HANA 1809

In the area of Procurement, SAP is delivering number of Machine Learning capabilities with SAP S/4HANA:

• Increased invoice automation and efficient invoice monitoring for exception handling
• Reduction of free-text items by automatically proposing the creation of a new catalog item
• Proposal of material group for free-text items in purchase requisitions
• Provision of options for materials without source of supply

Quotation Conversion Rates is an innovation in Sales and Distribution which truly delivers on the promise of an intelligent ERP. As an internal sales representative or a sales manager, you can use Quotation Conversion Rates to track to what extent your quotations are being converted into sales orders before expiring. By leveraging machine learning capabilities, you can gain predictive insights into quotation conversion by comparing actual and predicted results. The Quotation Conversion Probability (also known as Order Probability) is the probability that a quotation item will be converted into a sales order item. The probability, expressed as a percentage, and net value of the quotation is used in order to calculate a total expected order value.

In Manufacturing SAP is introducing Demand-driven replenishment. With the demand-driven buffer level management, you can plan and manage supply chains much more efficiently. Providing decoupling points with strategic stock positions, manufacturers can avoid the so-called “Bull-Whip-Effect”, where the variations in demand increases as you move further up the supply chain from customer to supplier.

Moreover, in inventory management, SAP included intelligence by leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning for decision support. Finance as well has quite a few intelligent innovations in store for you, for example predictive accounting. When a sales order is confirmed in the system, this is not recorded in accounting until goods have been delivered and the invoice has been sent. With the predictive accounting functionality, based on the sales order, a predictive goods issue and a predictive invoice is registered.

The Intelligent Suite build on the ingredients of the digital core
The Intelligent Suite will retain the modularity and flexibility of independent solutions while delivering a suite experience. Scenarios are business-driven and integrated, intelligent, and extensible. We embedded intelligence to deliver unmatched business value in each of the scenarios.

Intelligent Technologies
Intelligent Technologies will help SAP Applications differentiate while at the same time natively comprehending the context of the business application. This includes higher-order intelligence with many scenarios oriented along business outcomes and relevant to lines of business, feedback mechanisms leveraging IoT and business networks as data sources for training feedback, as well as actionable insights in order to derive connecting insights to strategic decisions via a consistent User Experience (UX).

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Approyo CEO Chris Carter Interviewed by techcompanynews.com

Approyo CEO Chris Carter recently say down with the folks at techcompanynews.com to talk about why he started Approyo, the big business benefits of SAP HANA, our new partnership with Bohh Labs and many other topics.

View the full interview at: http://techcompanynews.com/approyo-simplifying-sap-hana-adoption/

Q: What is the story behind Approyo, how did you start?
A: I started Approyo after meeting with a colleague at SAP and discussing SAP HANA. At the time, I was retired, and my colleague and friend at SAP came over to talk to me about this new technology called SAP HANA. After sharing a bottle of scotch and talking about my poor golf game, he convinced me it was worth looking at SAP HANA. At this point, I wanted to learn more, so I went to the SAP offices in Palo Alto and Germany to really get my hands-on HANA and see what it can do. I quickly saw that SAP HANA was truly a game changer. My next step was to become one of the early members of the SAP Startup Focus program. This program was a new initiative at SAP geared toward helping innovative start-ups grow their relationship with SAP and jumpstart their business. This program was instrumental in getting Approyo off the ground and growing in our early days. The rest they say is history… Over the years, we continued to build and grow our services, team and environments around SAP HANA. This focus continues to help us stand out in the SAP ecosystem and help companies and other SAP partners implement SAP HANA solutions.

Q: For the third year in a row, Approyo is on the Inc. 5000 list of America’s
fastest growing private companies. How important is it for you?
A: The ranking is very important at it continues to solidify our strategy and mission to become the leading global SAP Cloud Centric Solution provider. It’s not a question of “if” a company will move to the cloud anymore, it’s a question of “when” and “how”. This shift in thinking has helped us reach many clients who need to move their SAP environments to the cloud. When Approyo started, we really had to educate companies about the cloud. After many years of doing this, we are seeing the reward and we are viewed as a trusted advisor and true business partner.

Q: What are the major business benefits of SAP HANA?
A: SAP HANA provides a single in-memory data platform that supports both transactions and analytics on diverse data, a key requirement for applications supporting a modern, real-time digital business. In today’s digital economy, businesses cannot act on stale insights, thus a true in-memory data platform should support real-time processing for transactions and analytics for all a company’s data. This is a key differentiator of the SAP HANA platform against other traditional database vendors.

SAP HANA natively provides capabilities for machine learning, spatial processing, graph, streaming analytics, time series, text analytics/search, and cognitive services all within the same platform. Applications on SAP HANA can provide real-time actionable insights from a wide-variety of data types.
Combining these innovative technologies with SAP HANA’s advanced application development, modeling and custom algorithm support inside the database layer, more business logic can be executed close to the data. Specifically, SAP HANA’s support technology like stored procedures, business functions, core data services, rules framework, calculation views, and the application function library provide developers with a way to easily model complex data-intensive operations as close to the data as possible. Most competitive solutions require that you copy the data between core data storage and other technology stacks to perform these advanced analytics on the data.

HANA is also a powerful platform that easily integrates third party applications and data from other sources, such as social media and sensor readings, from the rapidly expanding Internet of Things (IoT). In today’s SAP environment, as much as 60% of applications supported by HANA are third party. The HANA platform enables on-the-fly business intelligence by quickly aggregating data from different sources and integrating it with SAP Business Suite, as well as third party tools.

Q: I read something about your partnership with BOHH Labs, how did that start and where do you see the relationship going?
A: The joint solution between Approyo and BOHH Labs is addressing the challenges enterprises face migrating to the Cloud and enables SAP customers to leverage the analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, while gaining a secure method to easily access all enterprise systems to quickly find, search and unlock the value of all their data. As more and more companies make the migration to HANA and the Cloud, they will need to leverage a trusted advisor and that’s where this partnership comes in.

Often companies are hesitant to migrate completely to cloud deployments due to security, performance disruption and accessibility. This includes migrating to the new SAP S/4HANA platform. The BOHH/Approyo partnership is reducing these setbacks.

Start your Journey to SAP S/4HANA with Approyo

If you use SAP’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, and you’re not using SAP S/4HANA, you’re on a deadline. By 2025, SAP will no longer support SAP ECC 6, the core component of SAP ERP. SAP S/4 HANA, a cloud based solution, is one way forward for all SAP ERP customers. Approyo can help your business prepare, migrate and support your move to SAP S/4HANA.

Based on the HANA in-memory database, S/4HANA is SAP's digital core. SAP S/4HANA gives companies a digitization-friendly IT environment to enable new ways of doing business -- that is its primary role. Its applications are interconnected in a way that traditional databases did not allow, enabling flexibility and real-time or closer-to-real-time insights.

Why move to SAP S/4HANA - Benefits explained

Innovation
SAP S/4HANA sets the stage for future innovation. Technology is evolving rapidly, which means merely ‘keeping up’ doesn’t cut it anymore. Enterprises have to stay ahead of the curve and make decisions that are future ready. SAP S/4 HANA applications leverage speed, context and data accessibility like never before. It is also driving cloud adoption by businesses, a platform which enables organizations to deliver innovative solutions and widens the capabilities offered by SAP S/4HANA itself.

Simplification
SAP S/4HANA brings about immense simplification to the management and administration of the IT landscape – in fact, simplicity is one of the key features SAP has brought in to its ECC application structure.  SAP S/4HANA enables the centralizing of hardware and network resources, and serves as the digital core for business process simplification, by harnessing the power of its HANA in-memory database. In older systems, enterprises often ran into issues of multiple batch-run dependencies. Elimination of aggregate tables, reduced processing time and the ease with which your systems can respond to transactions and queries, ensure that you are able to spend your efforts on strategic growth efforts.

Increased productivity
SAP S/4HANA streamlines business processes to deliver an expanded range of tangible benefits. Advanced analytics enable business users to access the data they need, instantly enabling transparency and faster reaction to changes in the business environment, while at the same time reducing the manual workload.

IT cost savings
SAP S/4HANA simplifies your IT landscape and optimizes data volumes, removing parallel and overlapping data. See more benefits of SAP S/4HANA

Understand your options
If you run ECC 6.0 or earlier version, you will need to upgrade by the 2025. Don't wait, start planning for your best upgrade path now and schedule a complimentary assessment with our team. We will help you understand all of your options and help you choose the best path forward.

Cloud Computing 101 - Types of Cloud Services

Cloud computing services fall into 4 categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and FaaS (functions as a service). These are sometimes called the cloud computing stack, because they build on top of one another.

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
IaaS is the most basic category of cloud computing services that allows you rent IT infrastructure (servers or VM’s) from a cloud provider on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Platform as a service (PaaS)
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) refers to the supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications. It is designed to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network and databases needed for development.

Software as a service (SaaS)
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet as per the demand and on a subscription basis. SaaS helps you host and manage the software application and underlying infrastructure and handle any maintenance (software upgrades and security patching).

FaaS (functions as a service)
FaaS adds another layer of abstraction to PaaS, so that developers are completely insulated from everything in the stack below their code. Instead of handling the hassles of virtual servers, containers, and application runtimes, they upload narrowly functional blocks of code, and set them to be triggered by a certain event. FaaS applications consume no IaaS resources until an event occurs, reducing pay-per-use fees.

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