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SAP INNOVATIONX LONDON Purpose and experience hot topics for SAP, as world’s biggest apps vendor disrupts itself with new vision and focus on making the world a better place through technology.
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AP’s InnovationX event was held at the Printworks factory in London and had a very different feel compared with many other tech summits I have been to. There was very little talk around metrics and most of the narrative was centred on problem solving, experience and purpose. Jens Amail, UK&I managing director opened the show – once the dancers had got off stage – with an 166
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understated keynote that focussed heavily on SAP’s responsibility as a global tech firm to ‘do good’. Akin to Google’s long-held mantra of ‘don’t be evil’, the SAP spiel was focussed on how it can make the world a better place rather than how many cloud ERP customers it has. That may be because they don’t actually have many cloud ERP customers, but it didn’t feel insincere and made a refreshing change to listen to a tech
giant talk about something other than world domination. The recent acquisition of Qualtrics was placed front and centre – as you’d expect it to be having spent $8bn on it – as Amail laid out a vision of experience-led innovation centred around the new jewel in the SAP crown. Unlike acquisitions for scale, Qualtrics brings something entirely new to the party and it’s not just rhetoric
