During the 2020 World Artificial Intelligence Online Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Sam Li, Global Senior Vice President and General Manager of SAP China stressed that the economic recovery of China will be underpinned by the digitalisation in the B2B sector. Moving forward from battling the global pandemic, the nation is now progressively setting long-term objectives to bring the nation back into the global race to technology leadership.

In this article, we look into SAP and China’s collaborative efforts in fostering digitalisation not only for Chinese enterprises but also for the development of the country’s rural communities.

Expanding Cloud Technology in China

China’s cloud industry has been on steady growth for the past decade and is anticipated to scale further offering more opportunities for cloud deployments. In a recent report, China’s cloud market size is estimated to reach CNY 375 billion by 2023. The study also highlighted a shift in the mindset of cloud service providers– from the capability-to-provide to the capability-to-enable.

To meet the increasing demand for cloud services in China, the local subsidiary of SAP has introduced a new private-edition cloud solution aptly named SAP S/4HANA in China. The new addition in SAP’s cloud portfolio in the country offers low total cost, high flexibility, and speed for enterprises migrating their existing SAP ERP environments to modern, cloud-based architecture. This development will support Chinese customers in their journey to recovery from COVID-19 by offering more options on every stage of digital transformation.

“Looking forward, SAP sees huge growth opportunities in China’s green development, digital economy, and smart manufacturing. In the New Year (the Year of the Ox), we look forward to helping Chinese customers accelerate digital transformation. Let’s head fast toward the cloud and rise to an entirely new level,” said Mark Gibbs, President of SAP Greater China. 

Gibbs also shared that SAP’s strategy for 2021 in China is broken down into three areas:

• Strengthen partnerships by offering more innovative, agile, secure, scalable, and easy-to-deploy cloud solutions
• Enhance innovation and localisation efforts with an emphasis on co-innovation with strategic partners
• Optimise and integrate customer-facing teams to provide more focused and efficient services to customers of different types and sizes.

Fostering Digital Skills in the Rural Areas

SAP and China’s partnership in fostering the country’s “rural renaissance” goes back to 2017 when the German software enterprise provided digital skills training and mentorship to workers returning to rural areas as encouraged by the government. In China and around the world, governments are creating rebalancing initiatives to address the decreasing population in the rural areas resulting in a disproportionate burden of poverty, malnutrition, and poor quality of life in the rural communities.

In 2019, SAP has become a major collaborator along with YouChange Foundation, China Charity Alliance, and Tsinghua University in the “The Leader Plan” initiative. By providing funds and volunteer expertise for online courses, SAP will be able to contribute to training 50,000 rural entrepreneurs across 30 provinces by 2023. Currently, the program has trained over 43,000 learners. SAP also took part in Tsinghua University’s “Elite Camp” courses and mentoring for entrepreneurs.

“We’ve had great impact with The Leader Plan, and I look forward to more success in the future,” Gibbs stressed.

SAP in China is looking into further helping the agricultural sector of the country with digital farming technology and information systems such as the use of e-commerce, Internet of Things (IoT), and data analytics.

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In January, oXya, an independent provider of cloud services, has received a global certification from Google Cloud as a Managed Service Provider (MSP). This has expanded the company’s market footprint to a global scale coming from its 2018 Google Cloud certification as an MSP in North America. Having operations and local support teams in the US, Canada, UK, France, Belgium, Spain, China, and Japan, this Google Cloud certification strengthens oXya’s capabilities in handling additional workloads and activities aside from specializing in SAP migration.

This month, oXya has achieved another recognition from Google Cloud as an SAP Specialization Partner– a solid confirmation of the firms’ comprehensive expertise on SAP systems.

Making a Mark as an SAP Cloud Solutions Specialist

oXya, founded in 1998 in France and acquired by Hitachi Group in 2015, houses around 800 employees– most of whom are technical SAP experts and IT specialists– and provides technical services for SAP to over 1,000 enterprise customers worldwide. In recent years, the company has been helping corporations and mid-size businesses migrate to SAP’s next-generation, intelligent ERP business suite SAP S/4HANA. As of June 2020, a quarter of oXya customers are running on SAP S/4HANA.

Sevag Mekhsian, Americas CTO of oXya, shared about the company’s long-standing partnership with SAP, helping customers become intelligent enterprises.

“We’ve been doing that by providing SAP customers with a range of technical SAP services, managed services, and cloud solutions. oXya has been a managed cloud service partner to hundreds of enterprise customers, who give us a 99{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} satisfaction rating. It is an honor to also be recognized by Google Cloud for our SAP expertise, an area in which we have been a global leader for many years. We have already migrated multiple SAP customers to Google Cloud, from industries that include Manufacturing, Retail, Oil & Gas, Media & Entertainment, and more,” Mekhsian stressed.

oXya recognises the public cloud as one of its significant offerings that have been helping customers achieve increased agility, advanced analytics, and meet business goals. Sharing about the company’s huge investment to improve its public cloud capabilities and the recognition by Google Cloud, Mekhsian said:

“This also includes our recent certification as a Google Cloud Managed Service Provider (MSP) globally, an enhancement to oXya’s MSP certification from Google Cloud that we earned in 2018, which only covered North America. Having earned both of these certifications, we are proud to have Google Cloud recognize oXya’s abilities and professionalism to migrate customer workloads to the public cloud and manage them.”

Bringing Efficiency and Flexibility 

According to Snehanshu Shah, Managing Director for SAP at Google Cloud, the SAP, Google Cloud, and oXya alliance can be traced back to 2018 when oXya migrated fashion retailer Tory Burch’s global applications and systems infrastructure to Google Cloud to support over 150 retail stores. Tory Burch was their first customer to run SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud. 

“Since then we have expanded our relationship with oXya. Many oXya customers are currently running their workloads on Google Cloud, enjoying our services and products, the latest addition was Rémy Cointreau. We appreciate the commitment and investment that oXya has been putting into partnering with us, resulting in them earning our SAP Specialization Partner certification. We look forward to many more joint customers with oXya,” Shah highlighted.

A French, family-owned business group and a global leader in spirits Rémy Cointreau, has tapped oXya in its Bluefield conversion project to SAP S/4HANA, with Google Cloud hosting. The project streamlined production and distribution under a single CAP ONE target system, with 37 systems supporting activities in the USA, China, and Europe. The strategic collaboration with oXya and Google Cloud has significantly improved customer experience and increased the agility and responsiveness of Rémy Cointreau.

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SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system from enterprise software solutions provider SAP. It was the first data platform to deliver real-time analytics on live transactions and provides the foundation for a data-driven enterprise to turn data into true business value. The solution is used by more than 32,000 customers. It combines a robust database with services for creating innovative applications for businesses to overcome complex data landscape and scale data management at a lower TCO (total cost of ownership).

With its advanced technological features, SAP HANA offers faster access to data in multicore CPUs through its fault-tolerant search capabilities, faster memory reads, and real-time data analytics. It can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid environment from several leading cloud service providers including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Huawei FusionSphere.

The new features of the database platform include hybrid extensions to the cloud, enhanced developer experience, increased scale and data reliability with tiered storage capabilities, external key server enablement, advanced data analytical processing, and improved predictive and machine learning. In addition, SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 offers an extended five-year support and maintenance commitment to customers.

Customers in the Asia Pacific region who have found success with SAP HANA include:

• Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), an energy storage company in China that specializes in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage systems, as well as battery management systems.
• Maharashtra State Power Generation Co. Ltd. (Mahagenco), the second largest power producing company in India.
• Prism Johnson Limited (Formerly Prism Cement Limited), one of India’s leading integrated Building Materials Company.

Seamless Cloud Adoption with SAP HANA

Cloud adoption has seen significant growth in recent years, with many enterprises continuing to embrace multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies in an effort to improve the scalability of their internet-based database capabilities while reducing costs and risks. According to the ninth Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, at the top of organizations’ 2020 priority list is optimizing their existing cloud use, followed by migrating more workloads to the cloud. Further, a fresh Gartner survey on cloud adoption says that 80{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of respondents using public cloud are using more than one cloud service provider.

As the only fully-managed multi-cloud support on all leading cloud service providers, SAP HANA is well-positioned in providing crucial support to enterprises in their journey to the cloud. To support customers in getting started with transitioning to the cloud, SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 05 adds new features that optimize data replication and distribution of processing to support hybrid scenarios between SAP HANA Cloud and SAP HANA on-premise.

Hybrid scenarios help businesses leverage their on-premise investment while still taking advantage of the flexibility of the cloud. Extending workloads or processes from SAP HANA Cloud, SAP HANA data lake as well as other cloud data storage such as AWS Athena and Google BigQuery is made easier through the SAP HANA Cloud gateway. SAP HANA further increases flexibility and cost reduction with enhanced cloud backup integration that allows the implementation of SAP HANA database backup and restoration directly from AWS S3.

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A leader in custom mobile and extension development in the SuccessFactors ecosystem and second-largest SuccessFactors practice in the world, Rizing LLC has recently been recognised for its contribution to Singapore’s digital transformation.

Rizing received the SAP SEA Annual Partner Award 2020 for Singapore Best Cloud Partner during the SAP SEA Partner Kick-Off Meeting in the city-state. The recognition emphasises the SAP Partner’s efforts with SAP Cloud that have been integral in enabling the intelligent enterprise in Asia-Pacific, specialising in SAP SuccessFactors and SAP product portfolios – including Concur, Enable Now, and Growing Teams.

Rizing LLC- SAP Collaboration

Mike Ellis, President of Rizing’s HCM line of business in the Asia-Pacific, received the award on behalf of the company. He said:

“I am very grateful to the SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Partner Management team for their recognition and ongoing collaboration, and extremely proud of the entire Rizing Singapore team and the extended organisation that supports them for this amazing outcome.”

“The innovation we have been able to accomplish with SAP’s Next Generation Partnership program has brought world-class solutions to organizations that might otherwise not have been able to engage with SAP,” he added.

SAP Next-Gen connects customers with academia, startups, accelerators, venture firms, and experts from SAP and partners to reimagine the future of industries with SAP Leonardo and support the UN Global Goals. The SAP initiative champions the future of the youth passionate about innovation and technology through platforms like SAP University Alliances, which brings together faculty and teachers from institutions worldwide to educate young thinkers and engage them with the SAP ecosystem and events.

Luc Hédou, CEO of Rizing’s HCM line of business commented:

“The opportunities to further develop SAP products to custom-fit clients of all sizes are extremely important to the growth of the intelligent enterprise across all businesses. Through their partnership with firms like Rizing – and, moreover, recognizing Rizing’s efforts – SAP is generating an ecosystem that can support unique business needs in an economical and simplified fashion.

Propelling Singapore’s Digitalisation

Recently promoted SAP Singapore Managing Director Eileen Chua shared her insights on how critical the role of SAP partners in the digital transformation journey of the city-state and the value of these partner recognitions. Chua said:

“Partners play a significant and multiplier role in Singapore’s digital transformation journey. The SAP SEA Annual Partner Award 2020 exemplifies the shared purpose, commitment, and success that allow our partners, together with SAP, to deliver value to our customers.” 

“To that end, I am pleased and honored to recognize and congratulate Rizing as the recipient of the SAP SEA Annual Partner Award for Singapore Best Cloud Partner. We look forward to building on this partnership with Rizing to realize even greater success in 2020 and help our customers succeed in achieving their digitalization goals,” she commended Rizing.

The top-performing SAP SEA partners recognised across seven categories during the event have exceeded KPIs and made outstanding contributions in driving SAP customers’ digitalisation while leveraging SAP solutions.

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Recently, SAP Cloud Solutions SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform are made available on Alibaba Cloud, China’s largest provider of public cloud services and the data intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. Apart from providing seamless integration of world-class SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions, this development enables Chinese enterprises to easily adopt SAP’s world-leading enterprise cloud solutions on the powerful Alibaba Cloud infrastructure.

Stefan Wagner, Global Senior Vice President of SAP, shared that the German software giant’s close partnership with Alibaba led to the deployment of SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform on the leading IaaS platform in China to help Chinese enterprises speed up their migration to the Cloud and kickstart their innovation and transformation. He added:

“Delivering on our strategy ‘in China for China’, SAP runs several co-engineering activities with Alibaba, combining our strengths to deliver solutions tailored to the Chinese market,” said Stefan Wagner, Global Senior Vice President of SAP.

Recognising the unique needs of Chinese enterprises, Alibaba Group and SAP will be designing local solutions that would help accelerate their digital transformation, which includes co-innovating in the areas of Internet-of-Things, Artificial Intelligence, and enterprise-level Big Data applications.

“The integration of SAP’s world-leading enterprise solution with Alibaba Cloud’s advanced intelligent platform will bring great value to customers, and help them to accelerate their digital transformation with much better experience. The partnership with SAP is an important practice for Alibaba Cloud to implement its ‘to be integrated‘ and globalization strategy,” explained Ken Shen, President of Global Ecosystem of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, fully built on the in-memory platform SAP HANA, is designed for business and provides an instant insight by using a single source of truth, real-time processes, dynamic planning, and analysis. Known as the digital core suite-of-choice to run a successful business in the cloud, SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables companies to migrate vital business processes in a cost-effective manner, experience faster deployment and shortened return on investment time.

SAP Cloud Platform is an open business platform designed to innovate, integrate and extend applications with agility, flexibility, and choice. As SAP’s in-memory platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Alibaba Cloud’s customers will now be able to extend their current business solutions, build new applications, and integrate with third-party technologies efficiently.

Last year, Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang has stated:

“The availability 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.”

As the plans of SAP and Alibaba Group to integrate their cloud technologies have come to fruition, the Chinese market can now take advantage of a versatile, all-inclusive cloud-computing environment.

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SAP Cloud Solutions are forecasted to drive 50 percent of the company’s revenue over the next two to three years, not only in India but globally. Subramanian Ananthapadmanabhan, Vice-President, Digital Core of SAP India said that the revenue is anticipated, especially now that its older customers shift to the cloud.

SAP’s global cloud revenue grew by 40{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}, to touch 1.69 billion euros as reported in its recent quarterly results.

In an interview by ETtech.com, Ananthapadmanabhan said:

“Most of them started on-premise and are now moving to cloud-based offerings, so there’s a huge opportunity in this market.”

He said that there is a double-digit growth for SAP’s cloud business in India. Such performance does not come as a surprise knowing that in the last five years, the overall market for cloud solutions in the country has grown by 300{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}.

“The big change we see in the last few years is that no one is asking for only on-premise solutions anymore. In the last three years, we’ve seen customers come back saying that they don’t want only infrastructure or platform as a service, but a combined software as a service offering. We’re seeing a shift to a hybrid model where companies will have data in public and private clouds, as well as on-premise data,” he added.

According to Nutanix, a cloud computing software company, the adoption of hybrid cloud workloads in India will more than triple to 43{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} from 13{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} in the next two years. If the projection is realized, the country will be the global leader in hybrid cloud usage and adoption.

SAP has 10,200 customers in India across the enterprise, SME and new-age company segments, with the SME segment comprising almost 80{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}. The country is one of the fastest-growing markets for SAP and recently ranked #1 “Best Companies to Work For by Great Places to Work Survey 2018 and 2019”.

The VP shared that the cloud remains SAP’s focus for 2019-2020. He said:

“There are two aspects to this. Customers are transforming themselves digitally and moving to an intelligent enterprise. The focus is on moving this intelligent enterprise to a cloud.”

The market has matured and has moved on from previous concerns around data privacy and residency. According to Ananthapadmanabhan, aside from leveraging cloud in digital transformation, organisations are now open to considering cloud solutions’ application in newer areas.

According to Gartner, the public cloud services revenue in India is likely to reach $2.4 billion in 2019, a 24.3{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} growth over last year. India is the third fastest-growing market globally despite a global revenue share of just over 1{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22}.

Sid Nag, Research Vice President at Gartner stated:

 “The shift from ‘cloud-first’ to a ‘cloud-only’ model in India is pushing organizations to increase spending on public cloud services to advance their digital business initiatives.”

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