SAP Turns 25 Years in APAC with Focus on Innovation and Skills Development

SAP SE has announced its plans to expand innovation capabilities in Singapore with an SAP Innovation Center by the end of 2014, focusing on delivering breakthrough innovations around Smart Cities, Industry 4.0, Healthcare and Digital Consumers. 

In an increasingly networked economy powered by smart devices, the SAP Innovation Center aims to foster local economic opportunities by identifying untapped market and customer needs and creating new innovative, user-centric products. This involves co-innovation with SAP customers and partners as well as research collaboration with local universities. Further fuelling the startup ecosystem, the center will provide local startups with the latest technologies and offer market access to expand their reach.

“While our technology is very sophisticated, it actually delivers a dramatically simplified IT landscape that benefits our customers,” said Rob Enslin, Executive Board Member and President of Global Customer Operations at SAP. “It ties in with our “run simple” philosophy, which includes simplifying our products and by extension, makes it easier for customers to take advantage of SAP technologies. In line with our vision to improve lives, this SAP Innovation Center will deliver a constant stream of innovative software solutions to tackle the great challenges of our time.”

“Asia Pacific is a fast-growing region. We are now entering the era of Internet of Things with the rapid growth of smart, connected devices and systems to meet the changing demands of today’s consumers.  As we embrace a networked, technology-driven innovative economy, we will focus on accelerating industry growth in public services, healthcare, financial services and retail,” said Adaire Fox-Martin, President of SAP Asia Pacific Japan. “Building on our 25-year presence in the region, we look forward to continued commitment and close collaboration with customers, partners, governments and universities throughout Asia Pacific, to drive innovation and skills development.”

SAP is also tapping on the increasingly vibrant IT ecosystem across the region to identify ideas at an early stage and leverage access to a large pool of the brightest young talent. Under the SAP University Alliances Student Entrepreneurship program, students can develop new solutions across SAP’s technologies leveraging in-memory platform SAP HANA, the SAP Mobile Platform and analytics capabilities. The students will gain access to these technologies, SAP experts, mentors and an entrepreneurship curriculum. Launched globally in March, the Student Entrepreneurship program was recently announced in Australia, Singapore and India and will be introduced in Japan and Korea later this year.

The SAP University Alliances program opens up the world of SAP to more than 1,800 universities in more than 80 countries worldwide, and aims to develop highly qualified graduates with critical skills for the 21^st century workforce. Annually, over two thousand tertiary students in Singapore benefit from this program.

Through a robust Young Thinkers program, SAP is also expanding its university partnerships to stimulate interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) in youths, address the gap in skills shortage and encourage entrepreneurial thinking. Across the region, this experiential learning program involves secondary/K-12 schools, government agencies and NGOs in Singapore, India and Australia to help youths understand the benefits brought about by Big Data today and its impact on societies, businesses and everyday life.

The Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) welcomed SAP’s expanded presence in Singapore which helps to reinforce the country’s position as a digital innovation capital for companies and industries. Quek Swee Kuan, Deputy Managing Director at EDB said: “For 25 years, SAP has been a key partner to Singapore in its contribution to the ICT industry. By providing co-innovation opportunities, the new Innovation Centre will enable companies to pursue their desired digital transformation strategies from Singapore. This builds on SAP’s active talent development efforts to leverage the capabilities of Singaporean students and researchers, and marks a deepening of our partnership.”

SAP to Manage Bharti’s Retail Processes Across Key Indian Cities

SAP SE has announced that Bharti Retail Limited (BRL), one of India’s leading multi-brand retailers, is strengthening its supply chain, store operations and improve customer experience with the implementation of solutions from SAP.  The range of retail solutions from SAP will be used to manage retail processes in addition to improve planning, accurate merchandising and thereby enhance operational efficiencies. 

With over 210 stores across key cities in 11 states, Bharti Retail is poised to become one of the country’s preferred retail companies. The implementation aims to build a solid foundation for the future and enable the company to bring to Indian consumers the benefits of world class retailing.

“It is our constant endeavour to provide localized and personalized interactions, compelling choices and flawless transaction execution to attract and retain customers,” said   Raj Jain, CEO, Bharti Retail Limited. “With SAP, we aim to add power to our cart and thereby redefine the overall retail experience for any customer who walks in to our store,” he added.

Additionally, Bharti Retail Limited has also decided to leverage OEM SAP Max Attention services to lower the risks, safeguard the BRL IT initiatives and deliver extreme value to its business. As a part of this offering, Product engineers /Architects are engaged to help construct a scalable retail business model by addressing perceived gaps and open issues. This implementation helped to dramatically reduce the cost of implementation and achieves business transformation through the implementation of SAP solutions. “The rules of customer engagement have changed. They are now in charge of the relationship and it is up to smart companies to find new ways to engage them,” said Deb Deep Sengupta, Chief Operating Officer, SAP India. “Responding to the need for richer customer engagement regardless of department, location or interaction channel makes SAP a top choice for companies in Retail looking to create lasting connections with their customers.”

Retailers are operating in a challenging market, coupled with competition from around the world and an abundance of information available at shoppers’ fingertips making today’s shopper more powerful than ever. The ability to respond rapidly to market demands is vital in the dynamic world of retail. Retailers need to operate across channels as efficiently as possible and find new and powerful ways to innovate and differentiate as quickly as possible. To help improve customer relationships, SAP solutions provide the means to turn today’s challenges into opportunities and help drive profitable multichannel retailing by offering retailers better insight to understand their customers and business.

Accenture’s Cloud Platform Accelerates Enterprise Migration to the Cloud

Accenture has announced new industry-leading management capabilities for the Accenture Cloud Platform that give organizations the power and flexibility to manage their workloads simply, effectively and more securely across both on-premise private and public clouds. New enterprise-grade capabilities—including flexible cloud integration options and unified billing analytics—delivered via a centralized management control framework, provide the ability to broker, orchestrate, manage and govern multiple enterprise cloud solutions on demand, at speed, from a single platform, with the assurance enterprises expect from Accenture.

A new discovery engine and an exposed application programming interface now allows users to access services either through the Accenture Cloud Platform portal, through applications directly, or through the native cloud provider console. This provides flexible integration options and greater resiliency, enabling organizations to stay on top of and leverage new service introductions and innovations from cloud service providers quickly, helping to improve enterprise productivity and competitiveness. The platform also provides a centralized view of usage patterns and unified billing with access to in-depth analytics for visibility of overall cloud spend, providing full budgetary control.

“Cloud computing is essential to delivering the capabilities required by digital businesses, yet many enterprises struggle with managing separate cloud accounts and remain uncertain about moving both new workloads and legacy systems to the cloud,” said Michael Liebow, global managing director, Accenture Cloud Platform. “The new, robust capabilities of the Accenture Cloud Platform help enterprises capitalize on the flexibility and agility of cloud, while enterprise-grade governance and control and enhanced security provide the peace of mind of traditional infrastructure – all in an easily consumed ‘pay as you go’ service model.”

Since its launch last year, hundreds of clients—in industries ranging from insurance and oil and gas, to media and entertainment—have already leveraged the Accenture Cloud Platform to rapidly access private and public cloud while maintaining control and oversight. A key enabler for helping clients make the journey to hybrid cloud, the vendor-neutral Accenture Cloud Platform supports private and public cloud technology from a broad range of leading global providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and NTT Communications, among other.

“Many enterprise clients have had to ‘back into the cloud’ from a variety of legacy IT systems, rather than having the luxury of being built for the cloud from inception,” said Charles Sutherland, executive vice president of Research for HfS Research. “The Accenture Cloud Platform, which has evolved dramatically over the past year, provides the brokerage and integration services that enterprises need in order to orchestrate the acquisition and deployment of cloud services across a variety of hybrid cloud options, helping them keep pace with the ever-increasing complexity of their cloud environments.”

Additional new features of the Accenture Cloud Platform include:

* Managed service model. Now cloud management is delivered as a service to enterprises via a fully automated, self-service model. The platform can be delivered in a matter of days or weeks in a consumption-based model. This provides ultimate flexibility in composing the set of management tools that are most appropriate for individual needs.

* Public and private cloud integration. The platform now enables the management of on-premise private cloud solutions built on Open Stack, VMware vCloud Suite and others. 

* Application and platform blueprinting. Containing all the key information to successfully build a complete compute stack and deploy applications in the cloud – including server, software, storage, network, images and firewall details, and how they all relate—the Accenture Cloud Platform’s automated, self-service blueprints enable multiple cloud services to be bundled, provisioned and deployed from a single model across public and private cloud providers while adhering to enterprise architecture guidelines and policies.

* Strong security and reduced compliance risk. The Accenture Cloud Platform offers fully automated, self-serve and managed security services like patching, back-up, monitoring and the ability to set policies for networks, machine sizes and images with full integration to an enterprise directory to ensure authorized, role-based access.

* Increased control and governance. The platform simplifies oversight by providing central monitoring of service usage and delivery across multiple services and private and public clouds. A one-stop-shop to request and provision pre-approved cloud services, the platform also provides policy management and approval workflow control, along with a suite of billing, chargeback and cost analytics, helping to make enterprise management and scale of cloud services easier.

This announcement is part of Accenture’s investment of more than $400 million in cloud technologies, capabilities and training by 2015 to focus on delivering the right cloud services from its network of providers, as well as blending its own industry solutions and innovations with third party offerings. Accenture has worked on more than 8,000 cloud computing projects for clients, including nearly 75 percent of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 14,000 professionals trained in cloud computing.

A Slow Festive Season For Indian Real Estate

Views by Anuj Puri, Chairman & Country Head, JLL India

The Indian real estate market is definitely in recovery mode again. However, at this point in time, it is more than evident that the festive season was not able to fully harness the benefits of market recovery. This is because the events that have catalysed the recovery – namely the new government at the centre, its pro-business policies, the encouraging Union Budget and the provisions it has announced favouring real estate – will need more time to bring their benefits to bear on the market. 

Likewise, the RBI has held on to current interest rates in favour of safeguarding against further inflationary trends. It will take several more months for the market to get into convincing forward momentum again, so the festive season did not bring the kind of momentum that was hoped for.

While demand exists, it is still held in abeyance by various economic factors, including the natural lag between the announcement and implementation of government policy catalysts. Reduced pricing could potentially induce some further sales momentum in certain pockets, but it is not likely to happen as developers are not keen on signalling a correction, especially when demand is waiting in the wings. New projects are in any case being announced at lower rates.

Developers have been addressing the situation by offering selective discounts and incentives, the success of which has varied across cities and locations. Those with greater holding power continue to wait for the market to pick up so that sales velocity will accelerate. 

With reference to the high levels of unsold inventory, launches have decreased consistently since 1Q13, with exception of 1Q14, in which launches increased. This has resulted in unsold inventory further increasing by 6.7% in the same period because of sluggish sales. It is only after four consecutive quarters of slow launches, activities such as reconfiguration of units, reduction of total ticket price, etc. induced some improvement in sales at the country level.  

Prior to the general elections, developers had launched many projects to gain a competitive advantage, and in anticipation of a recovery in market conditions after the polls. However, the launches did not really pick up post elections, as residential property buyers continued to remain cautious. This is actually positive, because in a healthy market environment, supply needs to take its cues from on-ground demand.  

In short, sales velocity during this festive season have remained uninspiring despite the various attractive pricing schemes and discounts that developers have been offering to attract buyers. However, the current scenario is no way indicative of what lies ahead for the real estate market, for which the outlook remains very much positive.

To my reckoning, we are currently at the cusp of growth, and the tangible manifestations of the current market recovery will become visible over the next twelve months. The old dictum ‘what cooks slowly cooks well’ is very pertinent in the present scenario.

Continental Tires Selects JDA Solutions to Transform its Supply Chain Operations

JDA Software Group, Inc., has announced that German manufacturer Continental Tires, has selected solutions from the JDA Manufacturing Planning Suite to help it transform its global supply chain operations. As part of the company’s SCM 2.0 transformation, Continental Tires is looking to employ different supply chain strategies to serve its different customers and channels based on their value to the business. Continental Tires will be deploying a global solution footprint from JDA’s supply chain planning solutions.  This integrated solution suite offering is united through the JDA Platform which also is a key facilitator for the integration to the SAP ERP landscape at Continental Tires.

With sales of €33.3 billion in 2013, Continental is among the leading tire manufacturer and automotive suppliers worldwide. Its Tires division has 73 locations in 42 countries. The division produces tires under the brand names of Continental, Uniroyal, Semperit, General Tire, Viking, Gislaved, Euzkadi, Sime Tyres, Barum, Mabor and Matador. By adopting a segmented supply chain approach, Continental Tires will be able to offer differentiated services to its various customer segments. This will enable Continental Tires to better meet variable customer demand, while also enabling it to execute customer orders in a much more profitable manner. It also helps Continental build a lean supply chain from production all through distribution, agile enough to address current demand and supply variability challenges.

“As a global business we must cater to a wide range of customer needs and we see a high performing supply chain as a key competitive differentiator. For instance, we are now serving more tire replacement providers than ever before, all of which have different demand patterns. Understanding these customers and being able to serve them effectively is a critical element of our SCM 2.0 initiative as we look to further grow our business,” said Marc Schürer, head of Global Tire Logistics, Continental Tires. “JDA has a clear understanding of how our business is evolving. JDA’s solutions, combined with its experience in both manufacturing and retail, made it the obvious choice when it came to selecting a partner to help us transform our supply chain operations.”

“A one-size-fits-all supply chain is no longer sustainable in today’s consumer connected business environment. Manufacturers need the tools to effectively analyze, plan and monitor their end-to-end supply chain, so that they can deliver a differentiated and beneficial service to individual customer segments,” said Mark Morgan, vice president, EMEA, JDA Software. “Continental Tires supply chain performance has been integral to its business success; therefore we are delighted to be helping the company on the next stage of its transformational journey."

SUSE to Host Hackweek 11 for Open Source Developers

WHAT: Hackweek 11, where hundreds of Linux engineers devote five days to development on the open source teams and projects of their choice. A SUSE tradition that influences and helps shape future product development, Hackweek is designed to support global collaborative innovation from the open source community. Since 2007, thousands of Hackweek developers have contributed to many popular open source technologies that impact thousands of companies and users worldwide. Hackweek projects this year will try ideas or complete original work on projects such as Docker, openSUSE and its ARM port, Machinery, kGraft live kernel patching, SUSE Manager and its upstream Spacewalk project, and SUSE Cloud and its upstream OpenStack project. This is the 11th installment of Hackweek. Awards will be presented.

WHO: For any and all interested open source developers and enthusiasts. Sponsored by SUSE, the original provider of the enterprise Linux distribution and the most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing.

WHEN/WHERE: Oct. 20-24 at SUSE offices around the world, with other developers participating remotely.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE: To sign up or for more information, visit hackweek.suse.com or email hackweek@suse.de.

Persistent Systems & Jive Software Join Hands for Digital Transformation

This week in Las Vegas at JiveWorld14, Persistent Systems will showcase its new partnership with Jive Software, Inc, including solutions and integration frameworks for enterprise communication and collaboration. The alliance strengthens the Persistent Systems partner ecosystem with Jive’s industry-leading platform on which enterprises adopt internal collaboration and external community best practices to help their employees, partners, and customers work better together.  

Highlights

* Jive is a leading provider of modern communication and collaboration solutions for business.

* Through this partnership, Persistent will work with Jive to implement solutions that improve how people and organizations interact and work together as a part of the enterprise digital transformation.

* Persistent is developing integrations with major enterprise IT platforms, a crucial driver of success for Jive and its customers, including unique expertise in bidirectional connectors.

* This further broadens the portfolio of the Social practice at Persistent Systems.

* Find Persistent Systems at JiveWorld14, Oct. 21 – 23 at The Cosmopolitan Las Vegas Booth S7

Aisling MacRunnels, Chief Development Officer at Jive Software remarks, “Working closely with consulting partners is one of the strategic ways we can help our customers achieve ultimate success with their Jive implementations. Persistent has built a practice with integration capabilities that are immensely valuable; and we have already seen great success in working with them and our joint customers to maximize their enterprise communication and collaboration solutions.”

Ranga Puranik, President at Persistent Systems says, “The digital transformation of companies, including how people and organizations work together in new and productive ways, is being shaped by software platforms such as Jive. This partnership strengthens our social and collaboration practice, and builds on our early focus and recent investments in it.”

Jive is the leading provider of modern communications and collaboration solutions for business.  Recognized as a leader by the industry’s top analyst firms in multiple categories, Jive enables employees, partners and customers to work better together. More information about Jive can be found at www.jivesoftware.com. 

Persistent will be on hand at JiveWorld14, the premier conference for modern communication and collaboration, attended by more than 1,600 Jive customers, developers, thought leaders and technology partners across several industries. This year’s program focuses on how people and organizations can work better together and gain competitive advantage through collaborative workstyles. JiveWorld14 offers more than 60 breakout sessions and hands-on training workshops about topics such as advanced community management, customer and partner communities and internal collaboration.