We’re still buzzing from the excitement at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW last week in Orlando! The show had over 20,000 attendees who were ready to connect, share and learn. For those unable to attend this year, there’s a lot to catch up on. Fortunately, over 200 sessions were recorded and are now available for replay.

Day one kicked off with big announcements from SAP, including a new licensing model and the release of SAP Leonardo, the next big thing in digital innovation. Along with intelligent automation and machine learning, digital innovation was a theme that surfaced frequently throughout the show. Day two included a keynote from SAP Co-founder Hasso Plattner that discussed how the UI has become more important than ever.  In his remarks, Plattner noted that “the UI is so important because it is such a huge cost factor, to train the people, to make people reasonably happy using the system . . . users need to be involved in the process.”

Other key themes we observed were:

S/4HANA and S/4HANA Cloud Release – S/4HANA has been a major theme at SAP SAPPHIRE in the past few years, and this year was no different. There was a major focus on S/4HANA Cloud because of the increasing demand for rapid business transformation. With over 175 sessions related to SAP S/4HANA – one of our favorite was YETI Coolers presentation on their testing approach for S/4HANA using Worksoft technology.

YETI Coolers presentation.

Support your digital transformation journey with SAP Solution Manager. SAP highlighted many of the new capabilities included in Solution Manager 7.2. Some of which will help companies on the digital journey with a common process landscape for business and IT, transparent requirements for deployment, and on-premise, hybrid and cloud solutions - just to name a few.

Worksoft was thrilled to launch a brand new offering during Sapphire that improves resource planning, helps optimize test plans and increase software delivery speed with SAP Solution Manager. We also covered this topic during a presentation that explained how Worksoft Analyze automatically generates and maintains SAP business process blueprints, enabling testing teams to take full advantage of Solution Manager and BPCA.

Business Driven Everything – Testing, smart data, analytics, discovery and more. Walking around the show floor last week, it was impossible to miss the emphasis placed on business driven data and analytics. The shift toward intelligent technology isn’t slowing down anytime soon, and is one of the primary reasons Worksoft has continued to place so much emphasis on automated business process discovery and testing for enterprise applications. Worksoft Analyze technology allows users to achieve high fidelity insight into their critical business processes, eliminating the need for costly interviews or tedious manual process mapping.

There’s competition in the era of digital business. As SAP CEO Bill McDermott discussed in his opening keynote, there are tons of buzzwords vying for people’s attention, but even experts have a hard time making sense of exactly what they mean. Blockchain? Artificial intelligence? Machine learning? From SAP’s perspective, “it’s all about intelligently connecting things, people and businesses – with speed as the key to digital business success.” Unfortunately, with speed comes risk.

Organizations using and adopting Agile methodologies will be happy to find increasing support from SAP. Going back to the SAP S/4HANA and Cloud trend - the SAP Cloud Platform enables development teams to personalize and integrate SAP applications faster than ever.

Lastly, it was made clear at the show that enterprises can’t afford to have their business processes fail in the new era of digital business. That’s why automation was such a hot topic at the show. Test automation allows you to check every process and app for every project across your enterprise as often and as much as you’d like – all with no manual labor involved!

Learn more about Worksoft’s automation solutions for SAP today!