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Editor's note

The SAP Sapphire 2019 conference will highlight SAP's emphasis on the "experience economy" -- technologies aimed at improving the customer and employee experience.

The company plans to kick off the show with Qualtrics customer and employee analytics software acquired in 2018. Attendees can expect concrete examples of the vendor's vision of combining Qualtrics experience data with operational data from SAP systems to make business processes more responsive to customer needs. SAP's new customer experience management suite, C/4HANA, will also play a role.

In addition, emerging technologies for the intelligent enterprise, including AI, IoT and blockchain, will be on display, along with developments in S/4HANA, SAP's next-generation ERP.    

1Experience management on SAP platforms

SAP is making a major push into software that gauges customer and employee sentiment and delivers more responsive products and services through tighter integration with operational SAP systems like ERP and human capital management.

2Migrating to S/4HANA ERP

Surveys show that only a fraction of SAP customers have moved, or even plan to move, to S/4HANA -- the product of a massive effort to rewrite SAP's flagship ERP, Business Suite, to run on its HANA in-memory database. Every year, SAP releases new features and modules for S/4HANA that force customers into reconsidering a possible move to the new platform and choosing between the on-premises or cloud versions, which differ in important ways.

3Emerging technologies for the intelligent enterprise

SAP Leonardo is the umbrella brand for a collection of leading-edge technologies that exploit machine learning, analytics and the broad reach of the internet to more closely connect people and objects in the physical world with SAP transactional systems. The company envisions building an intelligent enterprise that's more responsive to its environment, runs more efficiently and serves the needs of customers and employees. But getting all the parts to work together has proved challenging.

4HANA and delivery over the cloud

The HANA in-memory database underpins many of SAP's biggest products, including C/4HANA and S/4HANA. And like all major software vendors, SAP is striving to make HANA and other advanced technologies more accessible and affordable by delivering them over the cloud. Determining the proper place for infrastructure elements like SAP Cloud Platform is now a big part of the buying decision for enterprise applications.