Imagine being the best man for one of your friend’s wedding and not having the time to shop for an outfit for the occasion. Most of us come across these situations more often than not. Consider such a scenario - You rush to your favourite clothing store which saves a lot of time and hassle. All you do is stand in front of an automated system and key in a few details about the type of outfit you are looking for (party, formal or casual) and the system scans through your body structure (skin, colour, height, body measurements) and comes up with relevant suggestions. You are then able to visually see how they look on you. Alternatively, the system also points you towards the right stores where multiple options of your favourites are available. And finally while walking out, the outdoor system scans your purchase and generates the e-bill which is then posted directly to your credit/debit card that is already plugged into the system. No ques, no hassles so you are on time for the wedding.

This is the future we are going to live in. By 2018, these kinds of automated stores will be available everywhere. This is the magic of the digital world. To position your company for the future ready platform, it’s time to go where the demand will be in the future than to chase the remnants.

“Digifying” your traditional SAP estate will enable you to implement such innovative solutions as it is all about real time data management with creating new customer experience on the backdrop. Just creating an interface may not work if it doesn’t inspire people to feel your digital experience. You may want to use highly powered SAP HANA environment with strong and robust frontend framework like Fiori/ OPInt. SAP HANA will help you to realize/ analyse the data in real time and it also allows you to achieve smarter business innovation, accelerate processes and simplify business transactions. Similarly SAP Fiori is a collection of apps that mobilize key business processes in your SAP landscape

Adoption of OPEX based infrastructure model will be the first step towards Digitization - if you already have not done it. Hosting your SAP workloads on cloud will help you bring flexibility and agility to your environment. By the year 2016, almost every customer is planning to move or would have already moved their partial/ complete SAP estate on Cloud (Public, Private, Hybrid environment).

The evolution of cloud technology has opened up many exciting possibilities for enterprises. Improved budgetary flexibility by moving to an OPEX based model and the ability to lower costs by leveraging per hour charge of public cloud are some of the benefits with cloud based services. While enterprises now have a greater choice for running their workloads, a careful evaluation of the options is very important to match each workload’s requirements with the appropriate delivery model. We have seen customer using cloud deployment models into their IT organisation structure to achieve agility and reduce the overall infrastructure spent. Below are the IT trends that we have noticed recently, which describes the customer requirement and their approach towards transformation.

Sachin Pokalwar - SAP Lead Architect, Wipro, Ltd.

Sachin Pokalwar is a Lead architect with over 15 years of experience in SAP technologies. As a member of our SAP Digital Innovation Group, Sachin is primarily responsible for Cloud, HANA, Transformation & Migration solutions. He can be reached at sachin.pokalwar@wipro.com