SAP Sapphire Now and 2019 ASUG Annual Conference

It’s the first time we’ve actually heard of Sapphire Now or the ASUG Annual Conference but in the business world, it’s among the biggest in the industry of professionals and enterprise that uses SAP technologies.

So we’re here at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida for the 3-day conference of SAP’s Sapphire Now and the ASUG Conference. Sapphire Now is SAP’s own annual event for customers while ASUG (or Americas’ SAP Users’ Group is an independent SAP user group) also holds a parallel conference among members. And they’ve been doing this for the past 30 years now.

For most of us, SAP may be an alien name. It’s an enterprise business that works behind the scenes but a huge influence and core component to most of the top corporations of the world. Whether it’s in the finance sector, sales, marketing, HR or procurement, SAP has a complete suite of solutions to efficiently and intelligently automate back-end processes.

We don’t really see this work but it actually affects us on a day to day basis — from the way interact with a local telco’s customer service to ordering our favorite fried chicken delivery, SAP is somehow working behind the scenes. If you’ve had the chance to work for one of the top 1000 corporations in the world, you’d most likely encountered SAP.

Last November 2018, SAP also announced its acquisition of Qualtrics, a leading software and experience management company. The deal is worth $8 billion in cash, one of the biggest in the industry. Together, SAP and Qualtrics can combine operational data and experience data to close the gap in the experience economy.

We also saw Apple CEO Tim Cook on stage, sharing their experience with how SAP and Apple collaborated to provide better insights for their customers.

A lot of other big companies, like NBA, Levis. Tapestry and Under Armour, went on stage to share how SAP/Qualtrics has enabled them to efficiently run and grow their businesses. We’ll be getting more stories from individual enterprise customers today as they share their success with using SAP.