Published May 24, 2016 by David Carr, Forbes

SAP wants to be the first company you think of to help you run a simple, digital enterprise powered by live data and an elegant user interface. In other words, they would like you to think of them a little more like a German-engineered equivalent of Apple, with whom they announced a partnership earlier this month. I went to last week’s Sapphire Now user conference to catch up on how SAP is participating in the trend toward digital business.

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Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Becher, who used to hold the CMO job, said he sought a broader role for promoting digital trends “because I realized it doesn’t work if it’s only the marketing piece – it’s got to be end to end.” Now he has a dual role promoting more digital and agile ways of doing business within SAP, as well as promoting digital products.

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Published May 23, 2016 by ICT Business (Italy)

The German group, SAP, has unveiled Digital Consumer Insight, a new data-as-a-service solution, which will sell to companies, from 399 Euros, information on consumer packages in the real world obtained through mobile networks.

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Traceability will no longer be the prerogative of e-commerce. Privacy, according to the vendor, will be guaranteed the anonymity of the data collected.

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Published May 23, 2016 by CMSWire

Most of us know SAP as one of two things: the technology giant behind the revolutionary platform SAP HANA or the software engine that powers 76 percent of the world’s businesses. And while marketing fits into that mix, it’s not the first thing we think of … until now. Last week at SAPPHIRE NOW, the annual user conference SAP held here, there were three big announcements around marketing products.

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SAP officially entered the Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) business with a new product, SAP Digital Consumer Insight. It leverages data that interconnects traffic between the major mobile networks.

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Published May 23, 2016 by Jon Reed, Diginomica

It was a pivotal show for SAP, and a surprising one. Den’s got the review in SAPPHIRE Now 2016 – the verdict. One surprise – at least to some – was the ByDesign angle; Den wrote on that in SAP Business ByDesign – happy customers and significant progress.

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Another surprise was SAP’s digital consumer insight – a monster, Jonathan Becher’s stealth/skunkworks project now live on the SAP store (a product which impressed a lot of cynical bloggers).

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Published May 22, by CIO Today

Although numerous tools and services exist to track customer behavior online, the options have been more limited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior in the “real world” at brick-and-mortar stores and in other physical locations. SAP is aiming to change that with a new data service that enables enterprise clients to gain insights into the demographics of their customers, along with detailed descriptions of their real-world, offline behaviors. Called SAP Digital Consumer Insight, the new service is SAP’s first data offering. It was announced at the company’s recent SAPPHIRE NOW conference that ran May 17-19 in Orlando, Fla.

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Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer and head of SAP Digital, said that companies will be able to use the data provided by the service to glean insights that will help them improve their products and services, run better marketing campaigns, scout locations for expansion, and learn more about their competitors.

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Video interview of Jonathan Becher published May 20, 2016 by Diginomica

SAP has a mind-blowing analysis tool available on the digital store. This one really is a game-changer.

Click here to watch the interview conducted by Jon Reed, Diginomica, of Jonathan Becher disussing SAP’s new SAP Digital Consumer Insight data service.

Published by TechTarget, May 20, 2016

Digital leaders at CBS, IBM and SAP point to culture as one of the biggest digital transformation hurdles. Rather than resist cultural resistance to change, digital leaders at SAP, IBM and CBS encouraged executives at the recent Chief Digital Officer Summit in New York City to understand its root cause and get underneath it. Fair warning: Changing the corporate mindset or culture often takes time and creative thinking.

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For SAP’s Becher, cultural resistance eats up a good chunk of his time. “I’m certainly not a chief cultural officer, I don’t mean to suggest that,” Becher said, who became CDO in 2014 to lead the company’s new digital unit. “But I do think that 50% of my time is spent on deep mindset issues.” To overcome the change management hurdles, he and his team established “six characteristics of mindsets” required to facilitate change, Becher said.

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Published May 20, 2016 by Wirtschaftswoche (in Germany, not available online)

At SAPPHIRE NOW 2016, SAP CEO Bill McDermott announced to add digital goods such as marketing and payment data to SAP’s offerings and that customers will be able to download these via the SAP app store. According to McDermott, a turnover of USD 5 billion can be achieved with the new digital services within the foreseeable future.

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Jonathan Becher, Chief Digital Officer at SAP, said that Consumer Insights is just a first step. “We are going to considerably expand our digital offering in the coming months,” he stressed.

Published May 20, 2016 by InsideSAP

With data the primary currency of the digital world, SAP has launched its Digital Consumer Insight data service via SAPStore.com.The service pulls together insights into physical consumer behaviour, based on near-real-time mobile data, as well as details on where consumers are coming from, age groups and gender, comparison with other locations and competitors and the devices they are using. Data is anonymised and aggregated to protect the privacy of individual subscribers.

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“A wealth of information is available about consumer behaviour online but, until now, it was impractical for businesses to get similar information about consumer behaviour at physical locations,” said Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer and head of SAP Digital. “SAP Digital Consumer Insight allows businesses of every size to benefit from knowing more about consumers at a given location. The insights will allow them to improve their products and services, run better marketing campaigns, scout locations for expansion and even learn more about competitors.”

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Published May 20, 2016 by ZDNet.com by Doug Henschen, Constellation Research

SAP is stepping up customer guidance on S/4HANA deployments, but it’s full speed ahead on app modernization, predictive analytics and data services. Here’s a look inside SAPPHIRE 2016.

SAP Digital Consumer Insight Service: In the digital world, analysts can explore data on referring URLs (where site visitors came from), dwell time (how long they stayed on a site, page or item), and the entire digital path to purchase. The SAP Digital Consumer Insight Service announced at SAPPHIRE offers the equivalent of these measures for the physical world. Customers can download up to three days of mobile traffic data on any location in the U.S. The insights are derived from aggregated, non-personally identifiable mobile phone data from Sybase 365, which interconnects traffic between the major mobile networks.

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My POV: It’s nice to see SAP practicing what it preaches on coming up with innovative new business models — in this case monetizing its own data. I was surprised that the sales approach is limited to credit card purchasing exclusively through SAPStore.com. I could easily imagine a variety of pricing schemes geared to large businesses, but Jonathan Becher, chief digital officer and head of SAP Digital, tells me SAPStore.com is aimed at the consumerization of IT. The goal is low-cost, no-human-touch online purchasing of SAP software and services with an eye toward a truly broad market. It’s a digital disruption from within SAP, and it’s worth a closer look.

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