The group hopes to create an efficient digital process for managing its spend from end to end in an integrated way to fuel savings, efficiencies and business growth, using the cloud-based procurement applications and business network of SAP Ariba as well as S/4HANA.

As the first to introduced both SAP Ariba and S/4HANA simultaneously in Korea, the company hopes to consolidate and control spend across all major categories on a single, integrated platform in the cloud; make better buying decisions through deeper analysis; digitally transact with qualified suppliers; manage supplier relationship information, lifecycle, and performance; accelerate the contract lifecycle; and create a consumer-like contextual purchasing experience.

“We are pleased that Burger King will be our first customer to introduce both SAP S/4HANA and SAP Ariba simultaneously in the Korean market,” said Sungyoul Lee, managing director, SAP Korea. “SAP will continue to support Korean businesses to enhance efficiency and establish real-time business operation for their digital transformation journey.”

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With 40 stories across 24 cities, the implementation at Globus aim to build an omnichannel retail offering for the brand through integration on the cloud.

Using SAP S/4HANA, the company will benefit from insights into operational data to provide staff with contextual details, as well as providing real-time information to the board.

“We are in the era of instant gratification,” said Vinay Nadkarni, managing director and chief executive officer, Globus. “Providing engaging shopping experiences and customer-controlled delivery options is the need of the future. With SAP’s long-standing expertise, we look forward to creating the excitement and win unmatcchd brand loyalty of our customers.”

“Deploying SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, we aim to combine technology, change mindsets, and process discipline to help Globus transform its operations,” said Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, vice president, enterprise business, SAP Indian Subcontinent. “We believe that, as traditional retail players gear up to embrace Industry 4.0, it is forward-thinking retailers like Globus who will pave the way for the entire industry to benefit from customer-centric innovations.”

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Through smart contracts, CrowdFarmX will link small farmers directly to wholesale distributors and retailers, helping farmers to gain a larger cut of the selling price, potentially increasing their net yield by up to 10 times. The platform will also offer brand marketing and financing resources, as well as opportunity for exclusive partnerships with retailers to boost sales through Crowd FarmX Food Cradles, to be rolled out across the region.

With the implementation expected to go live in December 2018, S/4HANA Public Cloud will serve as the digital core for the platform, as well as drive and integrate production planning and management of associated business processes such as sales and distribution, procurement, supply chain, finance control and monitoring. It will offer predictive analytics, an integrated supply chain for customers, and support track and trace of safe produce from farmers.

“The global food supply chain needs to be completely reimagined in order to remain sustainable for future generations. With SAP S/4 HANA Public Cloud, CrowdFarmX will have an intelligent and intuitive digital backbone that supports us to have more complete visibility of the supply chain and supports rapid scalability. This is crucial to pioneering next-generation agriculture by bringing and supporting farmers to gain more benefit from market opportunities,” said David Tan, founder and CEO, CrowdFarmX. “Our ultimate goal is to uplift farmers from poverty, make farming a more lucrative profession, and secure the world’s future food supply.”

During a pilot phase due to run through to 2020, more than 1000 farmers are expected to be provided with sophisticated agriculture technologies such as IoT irrigation monitoring systems and data analysis on micro-climates and soil moisture. With support from Food Cradle partners in Sentul City (Indonesia), Graceland (Thailand) and Mekong Homes (Cambodia), the company hopes to deepen engagement with farmers in the network and to reach to more from rural communities and villages. Myanmar and Vietnam are also in the future expansion pipeline.

“CrowdFarmX is a great example of a company that is focused on purpose-driven innovation. This is very much aligned to our purpose of helping the world run better and improving people’s lives,” said Khor Chern Chuen, managing director Singapore, SAP. “We are glad they choose SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud as their core technology to achieve their goals in building a more sustainable food supply chain and to support their regional expansion ambitions.”

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The infrastructure will now have equal functionality regardless of environment, supporting the interplay between SAP-provisions nodes and those residing on premise or in a different cloud, and blockchain-enabled SAP applications and business processes with externally operated nodes and networks, to help customers meet specific regional, hardware and regulatory requirements.

SAP has also added support for Quorum, an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum. SAP already provides support for Hyperledger Fabric and MultiChain via the SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service.

Expanding its engagement with industry around blockchain, SAP has formed two new consortium groups within its SAP Blockchain Consortium program – one for the pharmaceuticals and life sciences industries, and the other for agribusiness, consumer products and retail, adding to the high-tech group established earlier in 2018.

Customers, partners and other stakeholders work together in the consortia to identify blockchain use cases and areas for collaboration. SAP now has 35 participants in its three industry consortia, including AmerisourceBergen, Arvato, CONA – Coke One North America, GlaxoSmithKline and Maple Leaf Foods.

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“China has been SAP’s second home for more than two decades,” said SAP chief executive officer Bill McDermott, who announced the move alongside Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang. “Alibaba and SAP’s growing partnership expands our ability to empower digital China by building intelligent enterprises. SAP embraces the China Dream as we prepare for substantial expansion here in the years ahead.”

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is China’s largest provider of public cloud services, and according to Gartner figures, the company is also among the world’s top three IaaS providers. The partnership makes S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform available via all top public clouds globally. As part of the agreement, SAP will continue to employ Alibaba Cloud’s technology, while Alibaba will adopt S/4HANA for its own innovation and new business model.

“We are pleased our partnership with SAP reached new heights today,” said Zhang. “The availablility of SAP’s globally renowned ERP system S/4HANA Cloud on Alibaba Cloud is yet another milestone in our globalisation strategy, and exemplary of our mission to make it easy to do business anywhere. We have formed a close collaboration with SAP in the part, and it is exciting for us to expand our partnership.”

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The initiative is guided by three principles:

1. Every organisation owns and maintains complete, direct control of all their data.
2. Customers can enable AI-driven business processes to derive insights and intelligence from unified behavioural and operational data.
3. A broad partner ecosystem should be able to easily leverage an open an extensible data model to extend the solution.

According to the companies, the aim of the Open Data Initiative is to eliminate data silos and enable a single view of the customer, helping companies to better govern their data, support privacy and security initiatives, and more easily use AI and advanced analytics for real-time insights.

“Microsoft, Adobe and SAP understand the customer experience is no longer a sales management conversation,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “CEOs are breaking down the silos of the status quo so they can get all people inside their companies focused on serving people outside their companies. With the Open Data Initiative, we will help businesses run with a true single view of the customer.”

To operationalise the Open Data Initiative, the three vendors will enhance interoperability and data exchange between their applications and platforms – Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Experience Platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP C/4HANA and S/4HANA – through a common data model, which will provide for the use of a common data lake service on Microsoft Azure. Customers will then be able to use their own choice of development tools and applications to build and deploy services.

Barry Simpson, chief information officer at the Coca-Cola Company, said the partnership is an “important and strategic development for the Coca-Cola System”.

“Our digital growth plans centred around our customers are fuelled by these platforms and open standards. A more unified approach to the management and control of our data strengthens our ability to support our growth agenda and our ability to satisfy security, privacy and GDPR-compliance requirements. The industry needs to follow these leaders.”

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The panel will ensure the adoption of the new AI guiding principles also announced by the vendor in collaboration with the AI steering committee at SAP, a group of SAP executives from development, strategy and human resources.

“SAP considers the ethical use of data a core value,” said Luka Mucic, chief financial officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “We want to create software that enables the intelligent enterprise and actually improves people’s lives. Such principles will serve as the basis to make AI a technology that augments human talent.”

SAP’s guiding principles highlight core values around transparency, integrity, quality and safety in the use of AI. The principles also support SAP’s stance on data protection and privacy.

Five members of the advisory panel have been confirmed, including:

• Dr theol. Peter Dabrock, chair of Systematic Theology (Ethics), University of Erlangen-Nuernberg
• Dr Henning Kagermann, chairman, acatechBoard of Trustees; acatech senator
• Susan Liautaud, Lecturer in Public Policy and Law, Stanford; and founder and managing director, Susan Liautaud & Associates Limited (SLAL)
• Dr Helen Nissenbaum, professor, Cornell Tech Information Science
• Nicholas Wright, consultant, Intelligent Biology; affiliated scholar, Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics Georgetown University Medical Center; Honorary Research Associate, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.

“AI offers immense opportunities, but it also raises unprecedented and often unpredictable ethics challenges for society and humanity,” said Liautaud. “The AI ethics advisory panel allows us to ensure an ethical AI, which serves humanity and benefits society.”

SAP is also playing a part in Europe’s debate on AI, with the European Commission appointing Markus Noga, senior vice president, machine learning, SAP to its high-level expert group on AI, charged with designing European AI strategy and ethical guidelines by early 2019.

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The opening furthers SAP’s growth objectives in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc to support more intelligent enterprises who can three in the fourth industrial revolution.

“Opening SAP’s office in Yangon shows our confidence in the country’s rapid growth and its rising technology capability in the region,” said Claus Andresen, president and managing director, SAP Southeast Asia. “SAP is really the enterprise application software of choice among more than 120 customers in Myanmar. With this kind of trust given to us, we believe that we can do more to help both conglomerates and SMEs to become intelligent enterprises, as well as continuing our support in harnessing technology to create positive social impact.”

Since entering the Myanmar market at the end of 2017, SAP has been selected by companies in wholesale distribution, consumer products and professional services, including Myanmar Posts and Telecom and City Mart Holdings.

“We at SAP really look forward to helping Myanmar’s private sector businesses, whether they are large enterprises or SMEs, to run better. We launch in Myanmar still armed with SAP’s 45-year-old purpose where we will look at ways at how technology can improve the lives of citizens,” said Verena Siow, managing director, SAP Indochina.

SAP has already made investments in Myanmar in social impact projects such as the inclusion of university students in the ASEAN Data Science Explorers competition, and support of nonprofit organisations through its Social Sabbatical program.

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Public sector expert Josephine Galla has been appointed managing director of SAP Vietnam, with a particular mandate to assist the Vietnam government in leveraging technology as a catalyst for economic growth.

Galla has more than a decade’s experience in the technology sector working across public services, mining and utilities. Most recently, she led a team of industry value advisors across South East ASiaa and worked as part of SAP China’s Growth Plan as a global account director, managing some of the largest mining and utilise customers.

Galla will report to Claus Andresen, president and managing director of SAP Southeast Asia.

“With the Vietnam government gearing up all sectors towards Industry 4.0, Vietname continues to be one of the most vibrant and dynamic economies in the region. SAP’s deep industry expertise in public and private sectors puts us in a unique position to use intelligent technologies to help the country compete in the digital economy. We remain bullish in growing SAP Vietnam and I believe Josephin has the passion to propel our growth ambition,” Andresen said.

“SAP Vietnam opened its doors to business 10 years ago, and during these 10 years of operations, we continue to serve over 450 customers in nine industries. With 70 per cent of our customers being SMEs, this just shows that SAP is the technology of choice whatever the size of business. We remain focused to work side by side with every business in Vietnam in their digital transformation journey.”

Galla said, “Now is an exciting time to be in Vietnam where both public and private sectors are united in the mandate to become an industrialized nation by 2020, build smart cities and drive sustainable development, and empower SMEs for Industry 4.0. Our vision in SAP is to power Digital Vietnam where we have highly innovative solutions to help the government’s aim to improve government services, equip Vietnamese youth with digital skills to be future-ready, and the right Design Thinking approach to co-innovate with our stakeholders. This kind of transformative vision energises me, and I look forward to working with the local team to make this happen.”

Verona Siow has also been appointed as managing director of SAP Indochina, taking responsibility for scaling the business across Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Bhutan and Maldives.

Siow has been with SAP for almost seven years, most recently as managing director of strategic conglomerates for SAP Southeast Asia. In this role, she drove the go-to-market strategies and business for the conglomerates across the region, building sustainable relationships, executive-level partnerships and innovation roadmaps with these lighthouse customers, many of which are family-owned.

Siow will report to Andresen, who commented on the appointment: “The Indochina region is a highly diverse yet major economic performer with an openness towards modernising industries and innovation. Thailand 4.0, for example, is leading the charge in creating a value-based economy driven by technology, innovation and creativity. This kind of openness is what makes us at SAP completely adamant in helping these countries thrive in the digital economy.”

“The Indochina region is a vast, diverse and prosperous economic growth area. Almost every industry from agriculture to retail are fertile prospects,” said Siow. “With Thailand 4.0’s welcoming stance towards technology driving their economy, I am thrilled to get the ground running on how SAP can support Thailand’s innovation goals. At the same time, all the rest of the countries in Indochina are coming into their own and I believe technology can even help these countries leapfrog to progress and be at par with the growth levels in Southeast Asia. Our purpose at SAP resonates well in helping these countries run better and improve the lives of their citizens.”

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The quarterly ‘Emerging Risks Report’ identified cloud computing as the top concern for the second consecutive quarter.

Social engineering and GDPR compliance were cited as most likely to cause the greatest enterprise damage if not adequately addressed by risk management leaders, according to Gartner.

“Executives are right to expand cloud services as part of their digital business initiatives, but they need to ensure their cloud security strategy keeps up with this growth,” said Matthew Shinkman, practice leader, Gartner. “Leaders should start by clearly identifying their most at-risk areas, which remain obscure to many large organisation leaders.”

Gartner expects cloud computing to be a US$300 billion business by 2021, as companies increasingly adopt cloud services to release their desired digital business outcomes. But companies continues to struggle with security – despite record spending on information security in the last two years, organisations have lost an estimated US$400 billion to cyber theft and fraud worldwide. To respond to an increasing number of cybersecurity events and data breaches, organisations elevate IT security to the board level.

“Executives should promote risk awareness throughout the organisation,” Shinkman said. “A strong risk culture helps employees make the right decisions and mitigates poor outcomes.”

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