I have been doing video interviews with a number of CIOs, software executives and practitioners about acrobatics they have been seeing in various vertical sectors during the COVID-19 crisis and the "New normal" they can expect as the economy wakes up. Here is the index to the growing list of interviews.
This time it is Geoff Scott, CEO and David Wascom, SVP Executive Programs of the Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG). They have over 130,000 members across thousands of SAP customers.
They describe acrobatics they have seen at SAP customers in the last quarter. It 's nice to hear Geoff summarize what they have seen as "unending optimism in the middle of tectonic changes ". They describe pivots and other scenarios at several manufacturing companies, window and blinds makers and life sciences companies.
We discuss the state of S/4HANA implementations - those already started are going ahead with creative remote support. Those planned for later this year are getting pushed back. We also discuss the opportunity to "lift and shift" ECC to a hyperscaler cloud, remote delivery and support from SIs and SAP's role in helping with vertical revenue-facilitating "edge" applications.
We also discuss trends in events world in the Zoom virtual world they find ourselves in, the state of video technology, the change in audience demographics.
I loved the positive tone of both Geoff and Dave. They bring out the stress SAP customer executives are going through with what Dave describes as an "overwhelming sense of optimism, while grounded in reality"