Leonardo Live: SAP Talks Up Deloitte And Accenture Partnerships

It’s been a busy couple of days at Leonardo Live in Frankfurt, with SAP not holding back in showcasing it’s new and improved Internet of Things (IoT) platform.

This has been accompanied by plenty of talk around the importance of digital transformation and the convergence of technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics that is making innovation possible.

Another notable focus has been the emphasis SAP has placed on its key partners, with Accenture and Deloitte specifically receiving plenty of stage time in the two keynote sessions.

Partner up

After a video featuring Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Meg Whitman talking about the importance of agility and innovation at speed (a phrase that has come up A LOT over the last couple of days) Mala Anand, president of SAP Leonardo, took to the stage to convince us of the power of the Leonardo platform.

She spoke about helping businesses “accelerate your journey in digital transformation”, SAP’s ability to extract value from data and the need to “innovate quickly and rapidly scale that innovation to drive quick business value”.

Anand also said the company is “very committed to building a robust ecosystem” for Leonardo, which is where the partners come in. “The partner ecosystem is a very, very important element of our Leonardo strategy,” she said.

“The ecosystem of our strategic alliances is well poised for us to unleach the true power of Leaonardo.”

First up was Accenture. Last month the two companies expanded their collaboration efforts with plans to jointly develop a range of intelligent digital services in the form of enterprise applications covering areas such as finance, supply chain, procurement and sales.

Narendra Mulani, chief analytics officer of Accenture Analytics, took to the stage during the event’s opening keynote to shed some more light on the partnership: “What’s very important in digital innovation is to be able to pinpoint value and once you’ve pinpointed, to move at speed and with agility to be able to deliver that value and then industrialise it as fast as possible”, he said, impressively getting all the buzzwords into one sentence.

He then demoed one of the apps SAP and Accenture have jointly built, a Smart Fleet app that tracks and monitors industrial equipment, using sensor data to anticipate downtime and improve the customer experience.

Real-time feeds enable businesses to track when and where issues emerge, as well as using predictive analytics to anticipate future problems.

The relevant information is then all collated for engineers, via the cloud of course, so they know exactly what work needs to take place.

“[IoT] becomes real with agility,” Mulani concluded. “It becomes real by being able to pinpoint the areas of value and most importantly, the ability to connect insight and intelligence to execution and to be able to do it in a rapid and iterative manner to create value across the digital ecosystem.”

Digital offerings

Next up was Deloitte, which has gone as far as to name a ‘chief Leonardo officer’ in the form of Darwin Deano. The partnership was described as a “global innovation relationship”, with the aim being to build a suite of services that enable digital transformation.

This has spawned the creation of the Deloitte Reimagine Platform, which “brings together Sap’s Leonardo capabilities and Deloitte’s business transformation and technology expertise”.

This platform will be used to create a range of “micro-services” – eight of which are already available – which use the likes of machine learning, analytics and IoT to enable innovation in finance and throughout the supply chain.

“We see what our clients face every day and the business is changing at a pace that packaged ERP cannot keep up with,” Deano said. “So businesses need an innovation engine to deliver accelerated value and that’s what Leonardo is.

“It goes beyond just analytics, it provides the capability to re-imagine how to do business in today’s marketplace.”

Both firms were, of course, full of praise for SAP and the Leonardo platform and their appearances showcase just how important partners will be to SAP’s future plans.

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