Big Data, Cloud, & The Future of SAP

By Ed Hawes

Looking back on the performance and business novelties of the past year goes hand in hand with preparing for new challenges that lie ahead.

The SAP ecosystem continued to boom with launches, news and trends. In a nutshell, 2017 proved to be another strong year for SAP, fueled by revenues from its Cloud business – and the outlook for 2018 is even brighter. SAP Leonardo will push growth, the company’s digital innovation system which includes all things related to SAP’s Cloud platform, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Analytics, Big Data, Design Thinking and blockchain. SAP committed €2 billion ($2.2 billion, £1.7billion) to IoT over the next five years which certainly shines a light on where talent can look to remain competitive and actively work to bridge any skillset gaps.

SAP is looking to not only help businesses innovate, but also scale their existing businesses. SAP is even investing in startups through their SAP.IO fund – focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning and blockchain technologies, specifically. Under the initiative, it operates a foundry that runs accelerators in partnership with Techstars – the largest startup accelerator program in the world, while the fund independently invests in startups.

In fact, more and more companies are seeing the importance of adopting cloud services. Gartner predicts that by 2021, 28% of all IT spending will be for cloud-based infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services. See below, a breakdown of the Compound Annual Growth Rates (CAGRs) by category:
                                                     

It’s no surprise then that tech skills, such as developers, systems analysts and data specialists, including those for HANA, will continue to be in demand during 2018 and beyond. The amount of information people have to process continues to increase and the ability to manage it effectively can be overwhelming. This is why big data and being able to automate the identification of data patterns and drawing conclusions from those patterns continues to be a skillset in high demand.

At RED, our entire focus is on matching the right talent with the right SAP career opportunity. We continually look to provide the foresight needed to keep our talent pool competitive and prepared to capitalize on the opportunities SAP is paving the way for – in both the near- and long-term.

Source: https://www.redsapsolutions.com/blog/2018/01/big-data-cloud-future-of-sap