Driving Growth in Today's Economy

by Richard Campione, SAP AG

To help customers innovate and grow while keeping costs in check, SAP is rolling out a series of robust SAP Business Suite enhancements in 2010. SAP’s Richard Campione introduces these enhancements, discussing the four business strategies that they address, as well as the underlying principle that makes it all possible.

Categories: IT Optimization, Innovation, SAP Business Suite, Strategy

Since its inception almost four decades ago, SAP has offered the potent combination of business acumen and technological expertise to help its customers run their business and facilitate innovation.

That mission does not change in this new economy, but it has become much more focused. As SAP’s Richard Campione tells it, companies must now concentrate on wielding business innovation to drive growth while still managing costs — and SAP will be there to help.

To assist with this business transformation, SAP is delivering innovations across multiple products in 2010 to help companies run, grow, and transform their business better. Many of these SAP Business Suite innovations can be rolled out in 6-12 weeks and have an immediate impact on business processes. As Campione explains, with the new enhancements unveiled in 2010, SAP customers can transform their business through incremental change — without having to overhaul their technology landscape.

Now that the economy is trending upward, SAP customers are looking to grow. Business innovation has always been top-of-mind for our customers. But it’s even more important now, in a time of recovery, when industries are re-shaped, leaders solidify their positions, and new players emerge.

A year ago, customers were inwardly focused on securing cash flow, shedding costs, and reducing payroll. Today, everywhere we look, we are seeing signs of optimism and recovery. But we are emerging from the recession into a totally new market landscape — the “New Normal,” if you will.

SAP’s challenge is to determine how to help our customers navigate through this new environment, in both the short term and the long term, to help them run, grow, and transform their business better so they can achieve their strategic goals.

Companies that make the right choices and the right changes now are poised to solidify their positions or become the next market leaders. (In fact, half of the Fortune 500 were founded in recessionary times.) To shore up their return to growth, customers are looking to their investment strategies in business processes, in IT, in business models, and in the optimization of all of their assets.

Accordingly, SAP is poised to help customers grow through a series of enhancements that we are calling Innovations 2010 (see sidebar).

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July 1, 2010