Overview

Changes for SAP in the field of SaaS provider:

Acquisitions of Success Factors for HR software

Acquisition of Ariba for Supply chain software

Lars Dalgaard was appointed as the head of SAP’s Cloud business.

RCA

Strategic stress point in an organization that results in significant change.

Platform can act as a benefit for the organization where costs are higher than benefits.

Liquidation of trade for more liquid market

Increasing the entrepreneurial thinking to grow the company either from inside or from outside the organization.

Additional Resources

SAP’s customers should plan on making their own cloud business strategies in order to fit into the cloud portfolio over a period of time.

Customers should be aware of other buyers such as Salesforce.com, and NetSuite.

While moving present systems to cloud, Consider important applications first such as finance and the rest such as CRM secondary so there is least disruption.

ReferencesSuccessFactors presented for users & presenting them within the SAP portal:

Easier Integration

Faster Deployment

Regular Updates

Unique multi-tenant Architechture

More measures taken for Data Security

Freedom from nonstrategic IT issues

Easily integrate Partners

Improved Scalabilty

Lower, more predictable costs

Should Success Factors remain a separate operating unit?

Yes it should as it would help different architecture intact such as ByDesign

Could the addition of SuccessFactors bring with it enough revenue clout to have an impact on the traditional power structure?

Yes, very big impact.

But could SAP seek to hike prices as it did with BusinessObjects?