SAP is addressing challenges in the high-tech sector with industry tailored solutions for cloud adoption such as GROW, RISE and embedded AI

The high-tech sector presents unique challenges for companies at different stages of growth.

Enterprise software providers must adapt their offerings to serve both established firms with legacy systems and scale-ups that require rapid deployment with limited resources.

With over 50 years of expertise and industry best practices, SAP has developed methodologies to help companies harness technology effectively – regardless of their stage of growth.

As Mark Lehew, SAP’ s VP of Industry Executive Advisory for North America, explains, established firms and scale-ups typically require different solutions.

“ Scale-ups tend to be growing rapidly, with limited resources and limited time,” he says.“ It’ s all about getting a foundational solution in place to support the business as quickly as possible with as few resources as possible.”

RISE and GROW: How SAP solutions drive growth

For these fast-growing firms, SAP created the GROW deployment methodology, which utilises pre-configured templates with builtin industry best practices – enabling them to quickly implement enterprise software systems to support the essential end to end business process of the industry.

“ It’ s a‘ fit to standard’ approach, where a customer can go live within as little as three to four months,” Mark says.“ The beauty is, once you’ re on the platform, as you continue to grow and get bigger, you can scale into additional capabilities.”

For more established firms with existing onprem deployments, SAP has developed the RISE methodology.“ A lot of these customers have been using our solutions since the beginning,” Mark says.“ Now they’ re making the move to the cloud.”

This move presents two primary challenges: architectural differences between on-premises and cloud solutions and the fact that established firms often have heavily customised their existing systems. RISE takes these factors into account, evaluating current functionality against cloud capabilities.“ While the GROW methodology focuses on standardisation and rapid deployment, RISE provides more control for the customer,” Mark explains.