Having just announced and seen demonstrated the new SAP Cloud for Planning solution at the EPM Conference last year, Ivo Bauermann of SAP took the opportunity as moderator of a panel discussion during the keynote address, to question the expert panelists on their thoughts and experiences of deploying applications in the cloud.
We were lucky to have three excellent panellists take part in the discussion panel at the event, each one of them with a differing experience in the use of a cloud platform.
Terri Himmel of Owens Corning, an SAP customer, spoke about overcoming their IT departments security concerns about using a cloud environment during the companies upgrade of its SAP Business Planning and Consolidation solution from version 7.0 to
version 10.0, resulting in a speedy and safe upgrade process.
Paul Hamerman of Forrester confessed to being a proponent of cloud as a new deployment model for software and said that they (Forrester) were seeing a rapid adoption of cloud across a number of applications, ranging from HCM, CRM and Procurement systems, and now he added they we starting to appear in Finance, ERP and BI. Paul suggested three reasons why people are gravitating to cloud as a deployment option:
- Business agility
- Speed of implementation
- The updating model
The third panelist, Joel Bernstein, CFO Global Customer Operations at SAP spoke about SAPs own transformation, to embrace the cloud model for their own Finance systems.
Around twenty minutes in length the video of the panel discussion is quite watchable, and the panellists views and experiences are very interesting and thought provoking – why note take a look for yourself?