The SAP Partner Summits for the Midmarket were held from March 3-5 in Orlando, Florida, and from March 17-19 in Barcelona. These remarkable events brought together industry leaders, partners, and innovators to explore the latest advancements in SAP technologies and strategies for driving growth in the midmarket and SMB space. This year’s summit was a testament to SAP’s commitment to empowering its partners with the tools and knowledge needed to succeed in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
SAP Product Offering for Small and Midsized Business
Throughout the summit, attendees had the chance to explore a wide range of topics, including SAP Business One, SAP S/4HANA, and the latest innovations in Cloud ERP and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
- SAP’s S/4 HANA with their RISE and GROW implementation strategies meet the need of larger mid-market companies with multi-tenant cloud deployment.
- SAP Business One is available on premises and in single and multi-tenant cloud deployments.
SAP S/4 Public Cloud and GROW implementation methodology enable “greenfield” start-ups experience the power of an “enterprise” class platform. The SAP Business One cloud offering with Starter Pack licenses provides a powerful solution for up to 5 users for under $100 per user per month. Furthermore, B1 is the more likely fit for companies under $100 million in revenue.
SAP's Strategy for the Digital Age
The SAP strategy includes a cloud deployment of core ERP with the SAP Business Transformation Platform (BTP) and Joule Copilot. The SAP BTP also supports SAP Business One. However, third party products dominated the conversation amongst SAP B1 partners.
Cloud, SAP Cloud and Cloud Service Providers
SAP is clearly all in on Cloud. Over the past decade SAP has purchased Concur, Ariba and SuccessFactors. SAP’s Business Data Cloud (BDC) unifies all SAP products and third party data for impactful decision making with secure and reliable AI. This powerful platform addresses the most complex needs of today’s large enterprises.
As compared to the all SAP approach for large enterprises, SAP relies on third party providers for midmarket cloud services. At least 10 SAP Business One cloud service providers exhibited at this year’s summits. Many of the CSPs are rolling out their own artificial intelligence solutions for SAP Business One:
- Private AI platforms to increase confidence and security over customer data.
- Chatbots for help and search and reporting on SAP B1 data.
- AI agents for smart provisioning
Cloud middleware and “integration platform as a service” providers BPA Platform and Alluvia exhibited BTP alternatives for SAP Business One.
Chatbots, Copilots and AI Agents
Chatbots use a conversational interface, allowing system interaction using text or voice. For example, users can ask SAP Cloud Service Providers “how to” support questions using a chatbot. Chatbots can retrieve data from your system to answer simple questions like: “who are the top 5 customers in sales volume over the past six months?”
When you add AI with a chatbot, you get a copilot. Whereas a chatbot is simply automating interactions, copilots are designed to assist and collaborate with users. A copilot interprets data in your ERP system to provide real-time guidance and suggestions within a specific workflow. For example, at the Summits, Coresystems demonstrated InsightLoop for customer service. InshightLoop provides interactive issue troubleshooting based upon product documentation, the item master file, and historical service calls in SAP Business One.
The Rise of AI Agents
AI Agents go one step further by operating autonomously to achieve specific goals and automating tasks. Agents interact with their environment, collect data, and use the data to perform self-determined acts to meet predetermined goals. For example, a customer e-mails a purchase order. The AI Agent scans the document to identify the customer, items, terms and prices. If the order agrees with the system parameters for that customer (such as price and payment terms), the agent creates a sales order. If the agent detects an anomaly, a workflow is triggered prior to completing the transaction.
MyWave has taken the early lead in Artificial Intelligence for SAP Business One. Featuring:
- an ever expanding roster of templates
- Numerous former SAP staffers and executives
- Most CSPs as infrastructure partners.
- An impressive list of SAP service partners to develop AI Waves.
In Barcelona, ERPure.ai was onsite demonstrating impressive AI Agents. This new agentic AI tool runs on the Microsoft AI platform and offers a customizable, yet turnkey approach.
Agentic AI for midmarket ERP is still in early stages. However, the opportunities for increasing efficiency and productivity are staggering!
SAP as a "True" Cloud Service
Competitors discount SAP as not being “true” cloud. They define cloud as a multi-tenant environment which does not require a local client other than a browser. With the SAP S/4 HANA Cloud offering and its numerous acquisitions, SAP has completely dispelled that notion for the large enterprise. The GROW with SAP implementation service further extends S/4 HANA to the upper end of the mid-market and fast growing companies who will become enterprise class.
SAP Business One’s journey to the cloud is also reaching its fruition. With version 10 released in 2020, SAP began investing in the transition of B1 to a true cloud application. At the Partner Summits, SAP showcased the roadmap to version 11. When completed, B1 will include true cloud infrastructure and a fully functional native browser client. Although the initial functionality was quite limited, the web interface is currently quite functional for vanilla usage of the application. As features have been browser enabled, they have been re-envisioned rather than simply replicated. For example, in the traditional client application the receipt of inventory with serial numbers in a specific location took three steps. In the web client it takes only one!
The Future of SAP Business One Cloud is Intelligent
- At I-BN we focus on improving our client’s productivity and effectiveness using technology to create a competitive advantage. The SAP Partner Summits reinforced our belief that SAP and SAP B1 Cloud will continue to be a major player. Automation and Integration will become intelligent with the addition of powerful AI agents.
I-BN’s Visioning Services can help you imagine your future and navigate digital transformation. For more information visit our website and request your free:
- Digital Transformation Readiness Assessment consultation
- Automation Exploration meeting request, or
- Cloud Optimization Discovery request.