SAP

And they can then fund the next cycle of the feedback loop in AI innovation.

And I think a last point I want to make is that they're serious... algorithmic innovation going on in europe in the ai space and again like we have the talent in this case we don't have the capital to to like scale it up but just to take one example like there's a company in southwest germany called prior labs they just had this type of It's not a clean exit, but sort of like an acquisition by SAP.

And they train a new type of AI model that can predict, essentially, entries in an Excel sheet or predict time series and so on.

From an economic perspective, I think 60% of the economy runs on Excel sheets.

If you can build an AI model that does that, where it's a giant, giant, giant market, that's what they did.

And they exited to SAP in less than 18 months or something like that.

And so, and that's not going to be the last innovation, right? So.

yeah the acceleration will keep on accelerating and there's no reason why it can't happen in europe why we can't innovate here and as we're building out these robotic giants and everything else where we're strong at and also like we as a investor are pushing that ecosystem quite hard we will then have like that like this kind of like you know money machine um which we can then put into our own frontier labs so i think that there's a way to to catch up there

But there's a lot more of the organization there.

And then SAP comes along and maybe affects the supply chain and ERP style things.

But AI is coming at everything, right? And just even managing this, if you're sort of like, what are some of the executives coming back with? They're coming back with, hey, we sort of know what we need to do.

We sort of understand that we don't have the organization yet for it.

They had to change the way they operated.

Let's learn from things like that to work out how we do a same sort of thing.

We used to have big monolithic Salesforce SAP apps,

great.

Okay, our special guest today is Stephen Fowler, an internationally acclaimed coach and consultant, drawing on over 25 years of experience leading enterprise software sales.

across EMEA, and also across AsiaPAC at organizations like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and Microsoft.

So he has huge and very relevant experience.

Like me, Stephen is a bit of a nerd.

That was as well the normal implementation back in days that we should customize as much as possible.

But most customers that I meet today saying they want to go standard, they want to utilize whatever has been built from Microsoft, from SAP or whomever the supplier is.

So that's where the value needs to come in.

But then where I believe that we tend to underinvest is actually not in the project, but it's when the project is complete.

Hello and welcome to episode 304 of our SAP on Azure video podcast.

Today is September 7th and together with Goran, we are here to talk about anything related to SAP and Microsoft.

Hello everyone.

Hi.

SAP Analytics Cloud is used by many customers for planning, analytics, and reporting.

But of course, many business users still spend a lot of time of the day in Microsoft Excel.

That is why the SAP Analytics Cloud add-in for Microsoft Excel is such an interesting topic.

It brings SAP Analytics Cloud data and planning capabilities into a tool that many users already know very well.

We're talking about ERP software selection and implementation with former IT and ERP director Doug Hanson.

Doug started out programming at McDonnell Douglas, and over the next 40 years, he led more than 25 ERP deployments running both SAP and Oracle across aerospace and defense manufacturers.

We're thrilled to have you here, Doug.

Welcome to the show.

And from there, it evolved from lots of little MRP2 systems that needed to be replaced by, you know, comprehensive modern scale ERP.

So that's what I've been doing for many, many years.

A lot of SAP, some Oracle, and then a handful of sort of smaller ERPs packages, which were suitable for the smaller companies that needed a point solution and didn't have a lot of money.

So, yeah, that's the that's the journey.

Und wenn, wenn-- Ich versuch's mal so zu vergleichen mit der klassischen Unternehmensberatungswelt, also Unter-- äh, Lösung zweiter Ordnung in der klassischen Unternehmensberatungswelt, also ich sag jetzt Big Four, sind ja eher Fehlanzeige, ne.

Also das ist ja eher, hier gibt's 'ne Fusion, hier gibt's 'ne SAP-HANA-Implementierung, das wird ausgeschrieben, das wird beauftragt und das wird umgesetzt, ne.

Also ist das so 'n bisschen die Differenzierung von 'ner klassischen Unternehmensberatung?

Ja, ähm, wir machen grad ganz viel, ähm, ähm, Restrukturierung.