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Mon, Oct 12, 2009 9:30 EDT
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Posted by: Jaideep Adhvaryu in Best Practices Topic: Applications
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The business landscape has changed dramatically in last year forcing all enterprises to re-assess success. The forces shaping the new reality put renewed demands on business and IT. This article will focus on the demands on IT and one key offering from SAP to address this topic.
The demands on IT can be summarized as: tighter budget, fewer resources, need quick decisions, and less margin for error. SAP understands these demands and continuously innovates to enable enterprise IT in their goal to support growth and efficiencies.
One such innovation is SAP EcoHub – the online marketplace of SAP and SAP partners’ solutions. SAP EcoHub brings the collective business value of solutions, services and communities of SAP and its partners to benefit customers.
Since the launch a year ago, SAP EcoHub is delivering several benefits to customers. This article will briefly discuss 7 key values SAP EcoHub is delivering to enterprise software customer buying lifecycle.
Value#1: Help identify and prioritize focus areas.
Typically, companies take inside-in approach to identify business and IT priorities. SAP has developed a valuable service called SAP Business Performance Benchmarking. This service helps a company to benchmarks themselves against their peers and industry leaders. The benchmark report gives business areas to focus and improve to be the best run business. And the clincher – this service is free and can be easily requested from SAP EcoHub.
Value#2: One destination to find all relevant solutions.
Anyone who has spent some time in sourcing of SAP solutions will agree that while there are many good solutions for every problems, it is very difficult to find and learn about them. One finds the solutions almost accidentally or only by word-of-mouth. Many a times, good solutions have been missed and affected the overall project only to be discovered at much later time. Customers are left wanting for one place to find all solutions. That one destination now is SAP EcoHub. One destination to find all types of solutions – product, service, technology, content, etc.. And more importantly, customers can find solutions from all partners irrespective of business relationship with SAP. True democratization in solution marketplace.
Value#3. Accelerated discovery the first step in accelerating innovation
When the marketplace have 400+ plus solutions and fast growing, how do you ensure that you find right solution fast. That’s easy for SAP. Like every other aspect, SAP EcoHub leverages the business taxonomy and semantic dictionary that SAP has built over decades of serving enterprises like yours. Each solution is categorized by industry, roles and line of business, products it complements, geographical availability and such. Plus each solution is tagged with appropriate commonly used business keywords. Searching and getting to right solution becomes fast and accurate.
Value#4. 360 degree evaluation 24x7
Online product demos, technical whitepapers, user review and ratings, expert community conversation about the product and customer testimonials give the full understanding of the products. Everything one would need to assess a solution is available online 24x7. And since all solutions follow the std template to provide the content, user gets a consistent framework to evaluate multiple products.
Value#5. Trusted engagement.
Customer always wants to be certain about what they are buying. While expert conversations and other customer testimonials are very useful, customers also want to know the formal endorsements between SAP and solution provider at partnership level as well as the solution level. SAP EcoHub will provide detailed information about the partner status as well as solution status to help the customer gain necessary confidence. Moreover, if prospect desires, they would be connected to SAP advisor to guide them forward. For several products, customers get option to try-before-buying. And of
Good work Jaideep