The 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers 2017

JULY 2017 

www.insightssuccess.com 

Teresa 

Mackintosh 

CEO 

10 THE MOST Valuable 

SAP Solution 

Providers 

2 0 1 7 

Business Corner 

SAP: Generating 

Business Value from 

Internet of Things 

FutureTech 

Future of Technology 

Through the Eyes 

of SAP Experts 

TRINTECH 

Transforming the Ofce 

of Finance through 

Risk Intelligent Automation

Editorial 

hen we talk about futuristic technologies, then the first 

Wthing that comes into our mind is about the robots. With 

the advent of automation, robots have been playing a vital 

role in automating mundane tasks to make them faster and less labour 

intensive, and SAP has helped automating processes with robots across 

all functional business processes including finance transactions, 

personnel and customer related accomplishments. Common areas that 

have seen success include payroll, accounts payable, employee action 

and customer service. 

Laying Down 

the Foundation 

Stone of Futuristic 

Technologies 

with SAP 

With the recent advancements in Robotic Process Automation with the 

application of SAP, the image processing domain has taken a glorious 

turn, and document imaging has become more user friendly and cost 

effective as it was never before. Taking this opportunity into 

consideration, companies are converting paper documents into 

something digital, working out the text and content with optical 

character recognition, and then rendering the information in a system 

that can be routed appropriately through the organization for review, 

consideration and approval. 

SAP has also been positioning its offerings as the digital core for 

modern business working on the cloud, S/4 and HANA, and is 

currently in an active delivery cycle, producing product updates and 

adding features. SAP's focus on S/4HANA is at extraordinary level, 

and the coming innovations on the core HANA platform are going to 

be interesting – HANA has truly proved itself to be a full fledged 

development and runtime environment, and not just an in memory 

database. Hosting applications using a wide range of technologies, 

such as TomEE and Node.js, and providing enterprise integration 

options, has only been possible with the help of world class 

development tools of SAP. 

With the help of SAP, entrepreneurs are leveraging their business in the 

domain of Big Data, Block Chain, Cloud Computing, Digital Business, 

IoT and Machine Learning. The pace in which SAP is helping small 

and big business grow and excel, the future of technology seems to be 

in safe hands and for sure it will bring a glorious change for the 

betterment of mankind. 

Sagar Bhattacharjee

Increasing customer acceptability 

with scalable and functional solutions 

based on the SAP Platform 

AP is always committed to continuous innovations, and has been leveraging both small and large enterprises by 

Shelping them grow and excel. With the increase in customer acceptability the depth of solution’s scalability and 

functionality has also increased. Taking advantage of these SAP solutions, companies are remodeling their 

structure to offer company wide visibility and agility. To flash the spotlight on the achievements of these admiring 

companies, we are introducing the issue of The 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers 2017. 

We have listed some exceptional companies that are not just implementing SAP in their business, but working 

enthusiastically to provide world class solutions and enterprise grade service. 

In this issue, on the cover, we have Trintech, which is transforming the office of finance through Risk Intelligent 

Automation. Trintech develops financial software solutions with an aim to provide its clients increased efficiency, 

visibility, and control to minimize resources, costs, and risks across the entire Record to Report process. 

Also, we have the most prominent SAP solution providers in this issue which includes, AES Corporation, which is a 

Fortune 200 global power company, and is well known for providing affordable, sustainable energy to 17 countries. 

Approyo, for being the leading global SAP technology solution provider, which makes it simple for companies to 

implement big data solutions through SAP HANA for today and the future. Configurable Management, for providing 

training, mentoring, and supporting services to their clients with their SAP, Winshuttle, and SharePoint software. 

Coupa Software, which is a cloud platform for business spend that is SAP ICC certified in SAP S/4HANA® 

integration and SAP NetWeaver® integration. Gigas, which is one of the emerging leaders in the Cloud Computing 

industry with their secure, stable, efficient and flexible cloud hosting services for customers of all types. Herrington 

Technology, for providing SAP Business Software and Hybrid Cloud Managed Services for advanced and accelerated 

business processing. rFactr , which is a B2B sales technology and strategy company trusted by the world’s best sales 

organizations who are using social media to drive leads, opportunities, and revenue. Spinnaker Support, which is the 

world's fastest growing provider of SAP third-party support and managed services, delivering unparalleled support for 

a fraction of the cost, while helping customers progress to their transformational objectives. Xpandion, which is a 

leading provider of ERP usage inspection solutions, delivering unprecedented real-time visibility into management 

systems, significantly improving security, optimizing licensing usage and enabling GRC/SOX compliance. 

We have included SAP Cloud Platform and the Future of Development for SAP and Leverage Existing SAP 

Solutions with Cloud Procurement, derived from the thoughts of James Wood and Brad Hill, respectively. 

Also, we have a great contribution of masterly articles scripted by our in-house writers, Future of Technology 

Through the Eyes of SAP Experts and SAP: Generating Business Value from Internet of Things. 

So, do flip the pages of our magazine, and we do believe that this issue will satisfy all your SAP solution provider’s 

information needs.

Cover story 

Conte 

Trintech: 

Transforming the Office 

of Finance through Risk 

Intelligent Automation 

08 

CXO Standpoint 

26 

Leverage Existing 

SAP Solutions with 

Cloud Procurement 

36 

SAP Cloud Platform 

and the Future of 

Development for SAP 

14 

FutureTech 

Article 

32 22 

Business Corner Editor’s Pick 

Future of Technology 

Through the Eyes 

of SAP Experts 

SAP: Generating 

Business Value from 

Internet of Things 

Vitality of R&D in 

an Organization's 

Growth

ntsApproyo: 

Simplifying the Cloud 

18 

Gigas: 

Providing World-Class 

Cloud Hosting Services 20 

Coupa Software : 

The Cloud Platform Which 

Everyone Loves to Use 

28 30 

Spinnaker Support: 

Exceptional third party 

support and managed 

services for SAP 

40 

Herrington Technology: 

Differentiated and 

Value-Driven SAP Delivery 

42 

Xpandion: 

Ongoing Improvement 

of the SAP System

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Senior Editor 

sales@insightssuccess.com 

JULY, 2017 

Corporate Ofces: 

Ariana Lawrence 

Managing Editor Sagar Bhattacharjee 

Co-Editors 

Pooja Jain 

Sachin Bhandare 

David Smith 

Visualiser David King 

Art & Design Director Amol Kamble 

Co-designer Alex Noel 

Picture Editor 

Contributors 

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Kaustav 

Art Editor 

Vinod Alhat 

Shweta Shinde 

Business Development Manager Mike Thomas 

Nick Adams 

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7 

,

Cover 

Story 

Teresa 

Mackintosh 

CEO

Cover 

Story 

Transforming the Office of Finance 

through Risk Intelligent Automation 

‘‘ 

Trintech uniquely 

met our integration 

needs with minimal 

IT involvement, 

across our diverse 

SAP deployment 

‘‘

Cover 

Story 

Due to growth through mergers and acquisitions, 

aggressive expansion during high growth 

periods and historical local system purchasing 

decisions, most finance organizations struggle to 

maintain a heterogenous ERP application portfolio. 

“Several of our large, enterprise-class customers that 

have chosen to partner with SAP® still identify 

challenges in regards to their financial close process 

due to the manual aggregation of information for 

period-end reporting that sits outside the ERP,” says 

Teresa Mackintosh, CEO at Trintech. “This manual 

work makes it incredibly difficult for companies to 

effectively deliver the required information for 

shareholder/investor and regulatory reporting, leading 

to high risk across the process and the business.” 

Having to rework the numbers after the close, incurring 

re-audit fees from third party auditors, re-statements of 

earnings and fines from governing bodies become all too 

common. So, what can be done to reduce this extensive 

manual effort and ensure standardization of processes 

and integrity of financial data? 

Ensuring the Integrity of Your Financial Close 

Process with Cadency® 

While the ERP plays a significant role in the 

management and automation of daily operations, 

it lacks the functionality to handle the 

complexity of the financial close process. With 

Trintech’s enterprise-class cloud-based solution, 

Cadency®, financial executives have the world’s 

only finance governance solution that integrates 

seamlessly into their existing ERP systems, 

specifically SAP®, to streamline all of the Record 

to Report (R2R) activities into a single, process. It 

provides you with the means of collating all the 

critical data in a single view, and can eliminate 

those white spaces that sit outside the ERP by 

providing pre-built Connectors and agnostic 

integration capabilities to standardize across the 

business. From automating and managing balance 

sheet reconciliations, managing intercompany 

workflow and transactions, journal entries, 

disclosure and fiduciary reporting and bank fee 

analysis, to governance, risk and compliance – 

Trintech’s Cadency solution optimizes 

resources, reduces cost and improves 

governance and transparency across the 

entire financial close process.

‘‘ 

® 

Trintech’s Cadency solution optimizes 

resources, reduces cost, and improves 

governance and transparency across 

the entire financial close process 

‘‘ 

Through its Risk Intelligent Robotic Process Automation capabilities, Cadency allows finance executives to 

succeed in a changing environment by exhibiting controlled agility – “controlled”, to ensure the highest level of 

data accuracy and integrity in financial close data, and “agility”, to adapt to and meet organizational changes that 

mitigate risk. This single end-to-end solution delivers real-time visibility into the financial close for the C-Suite, 

producing data-driven insights to propel strategic growth.

With all this information in one place, an executive console 

delivers real-time transparency and instant visibility to 

senior executives, enabling them to oversee the current 

status and make decisions and deliver actions before they 

impact the numbers. This also allows all financial close 

stakeholders across the organizations, in and around the 

world, to easily communicate and collaborate, creating 

real-time communities across the Office of Finance. 

Industry Visionaries Partner with Trintech 

Trintech has an impressive customer base with over 

1,700 clients worldwide – including the majority of the 

Fortune 100 – relying on it’s cloud-based software 

to help integrate into their existing ERP systems and drive 

valuable insights across their business, while leaving the 

manual and non-judgmental tasks for the robots. 

Siemens Corporation: Siemens launched a project to 

“bundle” its regional infrastructure functions. The 

objectives of this project were to improve efficiency and 

compliance and to standardize on a common set of 

processes. Siemens looked to its Global Shared Services 

organization to play a key role in the success of this 

project. When the project kicked off, the account 

reconciliation process was very decentralized amongst each 

of the company’s business units. Many locations relied on 

Excel and multiple shared directories 

to perform general ledger account reconciliations. 

Siemens wanted an efficient, automated solution that could 

integrate with its complex ERP environment to deliver 

best-in-class account reconciliation services to its various 

business units. 

“When evaluating vendors to partner with, it was very 

important to us that we had tight integration with our 

ERP environment. In North America alone, we support 

17 SAP instances as well as other ERPs and GL packages. 

Trintech uniquely met our integration needs with minimal 

IT involvement, across our diverse SAP deployment.” 

said Rob Koca, Corporate Controller at Siemens. 

Since implementing Cadency, Siemens has been able to 

reconcile 100% of its GL account and subledgers in the 

solution, while also reducing its overall cost to deliver by 

20%. It has automated the creation, review and approval 

of journal entries, dramatically improving the quality 

and reliability of the output. Siemens continues a close 

partnership with Trintech in order to discover further 

ways in which the solution can improve the efficiency 

and effectiveness of the financial close.

Cover 

Story 

‘‘ 

The majority of our 

customers have identified 

challenges in regards 

to their Record to Report 

process due to the manual 

‘‘ 

work that sits outside 

of their ERP 

AstraZeneca: AstraZeneca is a global biopharmaceutical company, with manufacturing, distribution and research facilities in 

more than 100 countries, generating $23 billion in annual revenue. The company supports a global workforce of more than 

57,000 people, and utilizes five regional SAP ERP instances throughout Europe, Latin America, North America and 

AsiaPacifc regions. Achieving global standardardization and strengthening its compliance was AstraZeneca’s main priority in 

its transformation project, as it faced severe risk managing a $52 billion balance sheet in Excel. 

Since implementing Cadency, AstraZeneca has discovered $2.5 million in savings, improved the productivity of its 300 users, 

and eliminated Excel spreadsheets, paper and manual effort. The company has increased compliance across 26,000 accounts 

and saved around 850 hours each month. 

“Now, the Cadency dashboard will show when a reconciliation is due, who is responsible for its review and approval, and 

where it is in the system. If it’s not completed as expected, there are alerts. It’s easy to identify issues and get into root-cause 

analysis if people aren’t meeting deadlines.” — Natalie Childs, Global Process Owner, Record-to-Report and Fixed Assets, 

AstraZeneca. 

Meet the CEO of Trintech 

Teresa Mackintosh, is the CEO of Trintech and has over 20 years of experience working with the Accounting, Tax and 

Finance functions of companies world-wide, helping them to be a catalyst for organizational innovation. 

Mackintosh began her career as a CPA at PwC and has since held several senior leadership roles in the finance and 

accounting space. She has experience serving a multitude of business units across Thomson Reuters with responsibilities 

ranging from product development to general management. Prior to joining Trintech, Mackintosh served as Chief Executive 

Officer at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting in the U.S. She has been recognized as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential 

People in Accounting,” and has also been named to the “Most Powerful Women in Accounting” list several times. 

Mackintosh received both her BBA and MBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Future Tech 

Future of 

Technology 

Through the Eyes of SAP Experts 

lock is ticking by and the time is moving away 

Cevery moment. What is future today, will be passed 

soon. As days pass by, it becomes easier for the 

industry experts to guess about the future, but not every 

professional is a specialist. Technology is fast evolving, and 

the future is arriving at a rapid pace. But it becomes 

difficult sometimes to move with the flow, and only those 

strive in the race who run ahead of the flow and not behind. 

Like any other industry, SAP is advancing too with a 

lightning speed. And to be in the race, the industry experts 

are making some suggestions about the changes taking 

place in the world of technology which one should be 

cautious about to prepare themselves for the battle to fight. 

Everyone is aware that the future is coming, but they are 

not aware of how it is coming and how that change of wind 

can bring success or blow everything, respectively. With 

each of these noted changes, enterprises can plot their plan 

to make themselves ready for the coming digital future. 

Future looks in the following way through the eyes of SAP 

futurists: 

Augmented reality and Immersive Technology is going 

to be the Change-Factor 

A few years back, no one knew about the concept of 

augmented reality and apparently, the market barely existed. 

Industry results suggest that there was nothing on the 

enterprise side and the applications are beginning to get 

built now on. Companies might start to use the technology 

of augmented technology to walk the field of several 

service reps through the processes-repair or, in an IoT 

(Internet of Things). This technological shift is believed to 

trigger data transfer in real-time and reduced costs whether 

it is supplied inventories, in a case of planned or actual 

spending. Experts suggest that to stay in the race, 

enterprises must renovate their work by adding virtual or 

augmented reality into their existing apps or the new ones 

that they are planning to launch. 

Blockchain Can Change the Scenario Entirely 

Foreseers have already said that blockchain possess an 

enormous potential and it can change the entire scenario. 

Though it is known that blockchain will modify the 

industry, how it will alter is still unknown. SAP gurus have 

defined the ways in which the industry will see the 

advancements. It is expected that this technology will help 

enterprises to experience understand business process better 

and mission-critical systems. Tech-experts are viewing the 

influence of the blockchain through a full end-to-end 

business perspective and predicting that it is going to bring 

significant advances in the industry as improvement in the 

supply chain efficiency, process speed, transparency and 

facilitation in business networks and exchanges. 

14 JULY 2017 |

Influence of Artificial Learning is going to 

Increase 

There has not been a day when the power of 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has stopped to 

enter the veins of every industry slowly. 

Since its inception in the 1950s, the 

technology is rapidly advancing and 

expanding its wings. The industry can 

presently see the influence in two different 

versions as machine learning and deep 

learning. Experts say that this is the year 

which is going to witness a genuine rise of 

AI. Machine Learning is helping 

enterprises in learning by statistics and 

self-learning with qualified data. 

Specifically, in the case of SAP solution 

industry, tech-gurus are betting on the 

deep learning algorithms to hit business, 

and they believe that those algorithms will 

change the way how business works. 

Robotics and the Emergence of Cyborgs 

Cyborgs are emerging, and the prominence in 

its usage is expanding. Industry will soon see 

that the world is turning into a land for testing as it 

is considered to be an ideal for machine learning 

and algorithms. Even experts are finding it difficult 

to predict the future as soon the day will come when 

the machines will bring in co-evolution with an 

extreme level of co-operation between human and 

machine. This collaboration has already been proved to be successful in the world 

of medicine, but the other industries are expected to experience the same very soon. 

Automation is Going to Transform the Industry’s Economic Structure 

It is quite clear that automation is going to change the workflow and the complete structure of 

work with its advancements in technology and ease in the work that it offers. But the bigger 

picture is here, how the workforce is getting affected, and the digitalization of the economy 

is taking place. Automation will soon take over the employment industry and replace 

multiple jobs in the market. Every company is focused on managing a contingent 

workforce and enable better training during the hiring process. With the application of 

automation into its workforce, the entrepreneurs are expected to get relief from 

certain problems and experience more economically stable condition. 

The world says that the people are aware that the wind is coming yet they are 

taking no steps to prevent it. They realize how the technological transformation 

is taking place, but they are doing nothing to address that, which is considered to 

be a major problem. But the experts apparently say that the main point is not 

how these futuristic technologies are helping businesses satisfy customers or 

enhancing market or economy, the way how they work together and bring 

value to the business is what matters the most. 

| JULY 2017 15

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Company Name 

AES Corporation 

www.aes.com 

Management 

Andres Gluski 

CEO 

Brief 

The AES Corporation (NYSE: AES) is a Fortune 200 global 

power company. They provide affordable, sustainable energy to 

17 countries through their diverse portfolio of distribution 

businesses as well as thermal and renewable generation facilities. 

Approyo 

www.approyo.com 

Christopher Carter 

CEO 

Approyo is a leading global SAP technology solution provider 

which makes it simple for companies to implement big data 

solutions through SAP HANA for today and the future. 

Configurable Management 

www.cfg-mgt.com 

Steven Branch 

CEO 

Configurable Management provides training, mentoring, and 

supporting services to their clients with their SAP, Winshuttle, 

and SharePoint software. 

Coupa Software 

www.coupa.com 

Robert Bernshteyn 

CEO 

Coupa is the cloud platform for business spend that is SAP ICC 

certified in SAP S/4HANA® integration and SAP NetWeaver® 

integration. 

Gigas 

www.gigas.com 

Diego Cabezudo 

CEO 

Gigas is one of the emerging leaders in the Cloud Computing 

industry with their secure, stable, efficient and flexible cloud 

hosting services for customers of all types. 

Herrington Technology 

www.herringtontechnology.net 

Valery Herrington 

CEO 

Herrington Technology provides SAP Business Software and 

Hybrid Cloud Managed Services for advanced and accelerated 

business processing. Herrington Technology has World's Top 

SAP Technology expert leadership. 

rFactr 

www.rfactr.com 

Richard Brasser 

CEO 

rFactr is a B2B sales technology and strategy company trusted 

by the world’s best sales organizations who are using social 

media to drive leads, opportunities, and revenue. 

Spinnaker Support 

www.spinnakersupport.com 

Trintech 

www.trintech.com 

Xpandion 

www.xpandion.com 

Mathew Stava 

Co-founder & CEO 

Teresa Mackintosh 

CEO 

Moshe Panzer 

CEO 

Spinnaker Support is the world’s fastest growing provider of 

SAP third-party support and managed services, delivering 

unparalleled support for a fraction of the cost, while helping 

customers progress to their transformational objectives. 

Trintech develops financial software solutions with an aim to 

provide its clients increased efficiency, visibility, and control to 

minimize resources, costs, and risks across the entire Record to 

Report process. 

Xpandion is the leading provider of ERP usage inspection 

solutions, delivering unprecedented real-time visibility into 

management systems, significantly improving security, 

optimizing licensing usage and enabling GRC/SOX compliance.

Approyo: 

Simplifying the Cloud 

realizing the business potentials that 

drives growth, improves ROI and lowers 

the risk factors by using SAP 

applications. Since inception, Approyo 

has maintained a goodwill of one of the 

largest US based SAP HANA firms. The 

company is enriched with SAP HANA 

expertise with over 200 SAP S/4 HANA 

and SAP HANA environments 

worldwide. With a team of experts from 

all over the world, Approyo is helping 

businesses grow. 

Approyo is on the Forefront of 

Technology 

Christopher Carter 

CEO 

With every new day, innovation comes into the world of 

technology. Stagnancy and constancy are the words which are 

inapplicable to the technological aspects of the world. These 

transformations in the technological sector provoke the change that 

companies demand. Sometimes, the need, demands and the choices of 

people are the reasons that lead to the transformations in the world. Among 

the tech giants leading the industry stands Approyo, a global SAP 

technology solution provider. Being the only SAP partner that allows to 

choose a suitable cloud environment, Approyo manages and supports their 

clients by revolutionizing the adoption of SAP and SAP HANA solutions, 

ultimately making SAP simple for all businesses. 

Approyo is dedicated to the success of their customers by providing 

expertise to help facilitate business growth, improve efficiency and increase 

the profitability of businesses worldwide. Putting a stop to the long duration 

of cloud migrations, Approyo sets up customer environments in just a few 

hours or days in an SAP certified cloud. 

With a truly comprehensive SAP portfolio and deep understanding of 

business processes, the company works towards helping its customers in 

Approyo revolves itself with the 

changing face of technology by providing 

the most updated and effective solutions. 

Providing the SAP solutions in the 

quickest and most effective way to the 

customers is the prime motto of the 

company. 

Approyo support companies to have a 

true SAP S/4HANA sandbox ready for 

them to be used anytime with SAP 

S/4HANA Ignite. This revolutionizes the 

world of SAP with a production grade 

sandbox at an extremely low cost, set up 

quickly on a secured SAP Certified 

network. This plays the role of game 

changer for all SAP customers who want 

to try S/4 HANA 1610 and ultimately 

migrate to S/4 HANA. 

Approyo is known to provide various 

services for various needs of their 

customers like Cloud Ignite, SAP HANA 

Ignite, SAP S/4HANA Ignite, GRC 

Ignite, SAP Solutions, Hadoop Solutions 

and Big Data Solutions. The company 


‘‘ Revolutionize your data and ignite your 

future with Approyo’s SAP solutions 

‘‘ 

looks at the current and future business 

needs and this is what gives its 

customers a better insight and access to 

important business data, enabling them 

to look at the big picture needs. Based 

on the needs of their customers, this 

SAP solution providing company gives 

its customers a roadmap to succeed one 

step at a time. 

Providing Unique Solutions to 

Every Individual Challenge 

It is a well-known fact that every 

company that runs SAP is different and 

each of them have a unique challenge 

and opportunity to offer. Approyo is 

strictly against the concept of “One 

size fits all”, rather they maintain a 

good-will of providing personalized 

solutions for each of their clients. As 

quoted by the company, “We work with 

companies across multiple industries 

and by working with so many different 

companies, it allows us to anticipate 

questions that companies don’t even 

know they have yet.” 

Approyo serves customers from all 

over the world. Companies like 

Covenant Transportation Group (CTG) 

depends on Approyo for unique and 

extraordinary SAP solutions. While 

talking about the services provided by 

Approyo, a CTG official said, “By 

leveraging Approyo’s in depth 

knowledge of the HANA architecture, 

we could build an analytics engine to 

solve the needs of the CTG 

organization, both with predictive 

modeling and through the analysis of 

huge data sets. This work would have 

been impossible on the in-house 

infrastructure.” 

Experience Where it Matters 

With almost three decades of 

extraordinary working experience in 

the “Big Data” and “SAP” industry, 

Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo 

founded Approyo with the goal of 

making it easy for customers to 

embrace SAP HANA. Chris works 

with businesses around the globe and is 

known to assist them in their journey 

to the usage of Big Data in the forms 

of Hadoop (Cloudera and 

Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His 

experience has earned him a national 

recognition by the American SAP 

Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, 

Cloud Expo and more. 

Under the leadership of Christopher 

Carter, Approyo support firms that are 

looking to grow and expand thier 

business and technology processes, 

where even one percent can lead to 

millions of dollars in business flow. 

The company follows the idea of 

“Work hard and play hard” and 

believes in hiring only the best and 

brightest in the industry. 

The goal of the company is to create a 

friendly environment where people can 

lean on one another and provide 

expertise and leadership. Approyo is 

growing every day and improving their 

services to help their clients, without 

changing their primary goal which is to 

become the most customer centric SAP 

HANA provider in the entire industry. 

To Approyo, consistent communication 

and support are the key to remain the 

best in the market. 


Coupa Software: 

The Cloud Platform Which Everyone Loves to Use 

onboard, Coupa delivers an Open 

Business Network that connects more 

than three million suppliers worldwide. 

Rob Bernshteyn 

CEO 

In the current digital era, business leaders must be updated and stay on 

top of new, emerging and the future technologies or risk staying back. 

Nobody wants to fall back, and every business leader is fighting to 

climb the ladder up to come on the top of people’s minds. Anything and 

everything in the world of technology are transforming daily; like big data, 

the blockchain, cloud computing, digital business, IoT, machine learning, 

mobile and their impact on SMEs. While talking about cloud computing 

systems and SAP Solution Providers, one can never miss the name of 

Coupa Software Inc., (NASDAQ:COUP) the company which provides a 

cloud platform for Business Spend that every user loves to use. 

Purposely built for the cloud, Coupa is known to deliver the only spend 

management platform that unifies business processes across all the ways 

employees spend money. Coupa is SAP ICC certified in SAP S/4HANA® 

integration and SAP NetWeaver® integration. The Coupa Platform is 

known to connect businesses easily and seamlessly to SAP Cloud and on 

premise. The company has designed and digitized financial applications 

with the idea of consumerization in mind and helping businesses in 

different sectors all across travel and expense management, procurement 

and invoicing. With a team of 800 extraordinarily talented employees 

Leading the Industry with Innovative 

Cloud Solutions 

Coupa offers its customers the most 

innovative solutions spanning travel and 

expense management, procurement, and 

invoicing, and when combined with their 

fully unified power applications in 

embedded analytics, sourcing, contract 

management and inventory, their cloud 

platform delivers faster return on 

investment and the control, agility, and 

visibility critical for businesses to 

compete. The company is popularly 

known to offer their industry’s first set of 

Community Intelligence capabilities that 

allows each of their customers to learn 

from the collective insights of their 

clients. At Coupa they believe, “Numbers 

speaks louder than words,” and the 

company doesn’t believe in boasting 

about themselves; instead their customers 

talk about Coupa and its services. 

Reports suggests that Coupa has helped 

various companies to grow their 

business; namely, they aided newly 

minted Fortune 500 Company, Molina 

Healthcare in scale procurement, Tire 

Centers to drive savings and improve 

operational efficiency and Staples to gain 

visibility and control of $3 billion in 

global spend. To Coupa, their customers’ 

achievement is a part of their success; 

hence, they have supported 

multinationals like Concentrix, Avalon 

Healthcare, Service Corporation 

International, CSAA Insurance Group, 

NEC and many others in stabilizing their 

businesses. 


‘‘ 

With Coupa, our customers are able to increase visibility and 

control their entire business spend as well as extend the value 

that their SAP ERP delivers to their entire organization 

‘‘ 

Increases Customers’ Visibility and 

enhances Control Over Business 

Spends 

Customers have reported having 

increased visibility and gained control 

over their entire business spends with 

the services of Coupa Software. The 

company also allows their customers to 

extend the value that their SAP ERP 

delivers to their organization as a 

whole. One can consider the case of 

Juniper Networks, which rolled out 

Coupa to more than 40 Countries to 

eliminate paper, digitize processes and 

reduce costs. It is quite clear by the 

business reports that customers like 

Juniper are standardizing business 

processes for operational efficiency, 

regulatory compliance and spend 

visibility. 

Industry reports apparently said that 

Coupa is leading the industry with a 

clear focus on comprehensive spend 

management. One does not become a 

leader overnight, and it takes several 

sleepless nights and endless efforts to 

make this happen. Similarly, Coupa 

has always offered its customers 

something more and unique solutions 

in a much faster pace than their 

competitors. They have developed the 

next generation community 

intelligence which is leveraging the 

power of all customers to provide 

prescriptive insights unavailable 

through any other means. The cloud 

platform provider is continuing to 

leverage what they have started to 

build and infusing their entire platform 

with normative ideas that allow their 

customers to gain a competitive edge 

by using the solutions of Coupa. 

About the Man Behind the Leading 

Cloud Platform 

With a wealth of experience of more 

than two decades in the business 

software industry, Rob Bernshteyn, 

CEO at Coupa, drives the company’s 

strategy and execution. Prior to Coupa, 

he has served various enterprises like 

SuccessFactors, Siebel Systems, 

McKinsey and Accenture at the top 

executive level making innovations in 

the industry. 

Apart from having a rich industry 

experience, Rob is also a guest lecturer 

at Harvard and Stanford business 

schools and a frequent contributor to 

Forbes and Fortune Magazines. He is 

often seen doing commentary on major 

channels like Bloomberg and NPR. 

Rob has earned his BS degree in 

Information Systems from the 

University of New York at Albany and 

an MBA from Harvard Business 

School. With all the knowledge and 

experience, Rob is supporting the team 

at Coupa to help each member to reach 

their highest potential. 

Coupa Feels Proud to Serve 

Customers Worldwide 

The company feels lucky to work with 

customers across the globe that has 

progressive IT organizations. Coupa is 

motivated to be more innovative, 

collaborative and successful. They are 

truly passionate about their vision for 

innovations with community 

intelligence to excitedly help lead the 

industry towards a better way. Coupa is 

known in the market as a mobile, 

collaborative community that does not 

seek to work in silos sheltered in a 

cube. The company is dedicated to 

delivering cloud spend management in 

a way that’s never been done before. 

While talking about the future 

perspective of Coupa, Rob said, “I see 

us expanding our global reach, 

particularly in the Asia Pacific and 

LATAM markets.” Coupa expects its 

cloud platform to be embedded 

community intelligence across 

applications in a way that every user 

experiences more efficiency and 

becomes smarter while just touching 

Coupa’s platform. 


Vitality of R&D in an 

Organization’s Growth 

esearch and Development plays an important role in 

Rleveraging technology to reap maximum benefits in the 

form of innovative products, processes, and services. Many 

companies tend to think that R&D is like a holy grail, but it’s not! 

They do not understand the importance until its too late. 

The fact is that, R&D is the only function that provides a platform 

for innovation and creativity to flourish in an organization. 

Numerous innovative breakthroughs happen only because of 

meticulous efforts of the R&D function. Consistent efforts are 

needed when one is in quest of research, every failure in R&D effort 

escalates the pressure to perform. 

Is R&D that Important? 

One is knowledge and another one is technology, these are the two 


vital ingredients for the recipe of innovation, and for 

successful R&D; innovation is the only prima facie. 

When a company takes R&D into significant consideration, 

they get a huge influx of knowledge. This is what makes 

these companies so amazingly successful, their contribution 

to R&D melts down to a world of useful knowledge which 

the company can use to further develop its main product 

lines. 

R&D helps a business to have a competitive edge over its 

competitors. It is only the R&D function that helps 

organizations develop plans much ahead than other 

functions. The R&D function requires a clear foresight 

about future problems and its solutions, in its development 

role, it can act as a catalyst for speeding up the 

organizational growth by introducing breakthrough 

products in the market. 

The Key to Everything is Patience, you get Chicken by 

Hatching it, not by Smashing it. 

– Arnold H.Glasow 

The R&D efforts can take some time to materialize, but 

once they succeed, the financial returns can be quite high. 

Many successful companies in industry sectors like 

pharmaceuticals, chemical and automotive, invest a 

substantial amount of capital expenditure and strive to be 

ahead of others because they believe; expenses on R&D are 

not to be considered as expenditure but as an investment. 


The true test of R&D function lies in time to market. Business exists for the sake of making profits. So, the role of 

R&D in minimizing the time to market becomes extremely important. Unless the R&D efforts in the lab cannot be 

scaled up within a reasonable time frame, little can be expected in terms of the functional credit to be assigned to 

R&D. 

Significance of R&D for Medium and Small Business 

Big MNCs have billions to spend on R&D but most of the small businesses do not have the same capabilities, this 

does not mean R&D is impossible. There are plenty of government initiatives, which are aimed at leveraging the 

R&D opportunities for medium and small business. Even venture capitalists have also recognized the importance 

of these smaller entries. 

Moreover, R&D is typically what your business can take advantage of public resources and eternal knowledge to 

get some hands on experience because, at the end of the day, useful knowledge is the most important thing your 

company needs. The R&D department is not worth of, if the desired outcomes of R&D are not utilized. 



Leverage Existing 

SAP Solutions 

with Cloud Procurement 

Companies that have already invested in SAP find 

that they can achieve even better results from their 

existing investment with cloud technology and 

eProcurement. After the initial investment, companies find 

certain roadblocks preventing mass user adoption and 

diminishing cost savings. Issues such as inability to stay 

connected, lack of insight into data, and complex and 

fragmented business rules stop businesses from using the 

full power of SAP. As cloud application technologies 

advance, companies gain the benefits of rapid deployment 

cycles, increased self-service tools, and faster performance. 

Vroozi delivers on the promise and power of eProcurement 

in the Cloud with seamless integration into SAP. 

SAP users looking to the cloud generally face a few 

questions, including: 

· How can I benefit from using cloud procurement? 

· Will my transition to the cloud be cost-effective? 

· How will my business processes be affected by cloud 

technology? 

To understand the benefits of cloud technology to existing 

SAP users, let’s evaluate three procurement strategies that 

highlight the power of cloud procurement. 

Value Realization 

Return on Investment (ROI) is a central factor in any 

procurement strategy. Buyers and trading partners of cloud 

procurement solutions need to feel confident that solutions 

will lead to cost savings and higher productivity and 

efficiency. Users quickly see returns by focusing on user 

adoption, compliance, and spend management. Spend 

Management allows companies to visualize purchasing 

spending patterns and usage and drives employees to 

leverage preferred pricing with contract suppliers. To 

increase user adoption and compliance, the cloud empowers 

a mobile workforce with the right resources and experience 

so everyone stays connected and available so that business 

is not disrupted. As user adoption and compliance 

frameworks increase with cloud-based systems, 

organizations gain immediate cost savings in procurement 

by decreasing transaction costs and preventing spend 

leakage with your supply chain. 

Efficiencies 

Process efficiency is key for a successful, healthy business. 

Cloud technology enables better processes by keeping 

everyone connected through a mobile experience and 

automating transaction tasks through the use of machine 

learning and pattern matching. With a centralized, unified 

system, cloud automation can yield immediate benefits in 

requisition to invoice and payment business processes and 

reduced errors and issues leading to higher productivity and 

decreased processing costs. Further, by allowing employees 



to interact with cloud procurement via smart 

Phones and tablets, business can continue to 

move with efficiency and speed. 

IT Cost Savings 

Perhaps no determinant is more important in 

realizing the benefits of cloud technologies 

versus traditional on premise software is in IT 

Cost Savings. Systems and applications which 

required large physical infrastructure and 

monetary investments can now provide 

inexpensive and scalable solutions through the 

Cloud and cloud infrastructure providers. A 

procurement solution that integrates with SAP is 

easier to access, less expensive, and takes a 

fraction of the implementation time companies 

once faced with traditional software solutions. 

Cloud technology relieves the user of hidden 

costs such as hardware, consultants, 

infrastructure, maintenance, and costly upgrade 

cycles, providing lower risk and lower total cost 

of ownership. 

Conclusion 

The cloud offers little upfront expense, automatic 

upgrades, and pre-integrated best practices which 

allow organizations to focus on business growth 

and improved operating margins. Vroozi’s 

eProcurement solution that takes SAP solutions 

to the cloud empower users with better returns, 

better processes and higher savings, so their 

overall SAP investment’s ROI is accelerated. 

According to IDC, spending on Cloud 

computing is growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT 

spending since 2009 and is expected to continue 

growing at more than 6 times the rate of IT 

spending from 2015 through 2020. (via Forbes) 

This massive growth is easily understood when 

businesses understand the power and value of 

cloud solutions. With the Vroozi Platform, 

companies can take advantage of robust 

eProcurement technology delivered in the Cloud 

and integrated seamlessly with SAP. 

Brad Hill 

Director of Global Sales & Marketing 

Vroozi 

Brad Hill, Director of Global Sales & Marketing 

of Vroozi is a passionate leader and is 

responsible for expanding the Vroozi Product 

Suite, Brand Adoption, Partnership Network & 

ensuring our customers receive an unparalleled 

experience with Vroozi. Brad spent the last 20 

years building Enterprise Sales and Product 

strategies with leading IT Services 

organizations. His entrepreneurial strategies 

have served a vast number of Fortune 500 

industries and verticals. He is also an aspiring 

mechanic and frustrated golfer, two good 

reminders to keep his day job. 


Gigas: 

Providing World-Class Cloud Hosting Services 

offering sound technical support. It 

should come as no surprise that last year 

Gigas won the tender to be one of the five 

official suppliers of public cloud services 

to the European Commission and its 

Agencies. 

Diego Cabezudo, 

Co-founder & CEO 

n the last few years, Cloud-based services have become more of a 

Istandard solution for the enterprise world. It is further estimated that 

cloud-computing will continue to grow at a robust pace in the next five 

years. Their establishment in the IT market is due to the unmatched 

advantages that it offers. It provides quick access to functionality, flexibility 

due to subscriptions, scalability to support evolving business needs and 

reduces IT efforts. One of the emerging leaders in this highly competitive 

market is Gigas, a Spanish Cloud Computing company listed on the 

Madrid Stock Exchange since 2015. They have built a world-class cloud 

hosting business that provides best-in-class solutions and services to 

customers worldwide. 

Established by proficient internet experts, Gigas offers the most powerful 

cloud hosting solutions to customers from all verticals, in a simple, safe, 

reliable, flexible, scalable, efficient and cost-effective manner. They have 

emerged as a true market leader in its native Spanish market and key- 

Spanish markets throughout Latin America, thereby attracting large 

enterprises such as Walmart, Aon, Diners Club, OHL, United Nations, 

Canal 13 and various others. They are well-known for their close operating 

relationship with their customers, providing tailored solutions and for 

Breaking-free from the Shackles 

When the company was formed in 2011, 

Gigas spotted SAP as the perfect match 

for the cloud services it was offering to 

its customers. Cloud Infrastructure as a 

service back then was almost nonexistent 

in the Spanish market. It was 

their visionary that enabled them to 

foresee a future in which the rapid 

adoption of certain mission-critical 

applications with significant computing 

needs supported by virtualized 

infrastructure made total sense. 

For an on-premise environment, putting 

together an enterprise application SAP 

involved an enormous investment upfront. 

In addition to the hefty 

investments, implementation time to set 

up the infrastructure also takes longer. 

Before setting up Gigas, these problems 

were pre-existent within the industry. The 

idea behind the launch of Gigas was to 

address and solve these issues, by 

reducing implementation time to market 

dramatically, scaling infrastructure 

resources up or down as per the business 

requirements and more importantly, by 

reducing costs. 

Providing a Pool of Services 

Gigas SAP-certified Cloud Datacenter is 

the only available solution in the market 

that allows their customers to define and 

design their own cloud infrastructure. 


‘‘ The security and trust that we build with 

our clients is what really sets us apart 

‘‘ 

Unlike its contemporaries, they do not 

sell virtual machinery, rather a set of 

unlimited resources (RAM, memory, 

storage) to replicate a physical data 

center in a virtual environment. Within 

their Cloud Datacenter, they provide 

their customers with a basic firewall 

for each of their servers. Gigas offers 

the most advanced security solutions 

through their partnerships with some of 

the leading firewall vendors such as 

Fortinet. 

Their Cloud Datacenter solution is one 

of the few in the world to comply with 

the new European Code of Conduct for 

Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers. 

This, in turn, ensures optimum privacy 

of customer’s data and is in 

compliance with the strict European 

Data Protection regulations. 

In addition to all the services 

mentioned above, Gigas is obsessed 

with providing the best technical 

support among its contemporaries. 

They understand that in complex 

environments problems are bound to 

spring up, which is why they strive 

towards providing a knowledgeable 

and empowered customer technical 

support to solve customer issues and 

queries as soon as possible. With a 

track record of solving over 80% of 

their customer queries within their first 

contact itself, Gigas holds an 

unprecedented position in providing 

customer satisfaction. 

An Inspiring Duo with an Eye for 

the Future 

Gigas was found and built from the 

bottom by the duo of Jose Antonio 

Arribas, who currently holds the COO 

position, and Diego Cabezudo, the 

CEO of the company. It was them who 

spotted SAP as the perfect match for 

the cloud services they wanted to offer 

their customers. Their ideas and astute 

prediction of the future market trends, 

propelled Gigas to what it is known as 

today. 

Their combined experience of over 40 

years in the tech arena, led Gigas to 

become the leading cloud hosting 

company in Spain and a growing force 

in the Latin American market. Among 

the two, Jose holds a Bachelor of 

Science degree in Information 

Technology, whereas Diego completed 

Telecommunications Engineering from 

the University of Navarra in Spain. The 

latter further continued with his study 

by completing an Executive MBA 

course from the London Business 

School. 

Living up to the Responsibilities of 

Hosting a SAP Platform 

It is of enormous responsibility to host 

a SAP platform that supports some of 

the most critical processes and 

information of a company. Customers 

are always on the lookout for 

companies that can provide an 

enterprise grade service, but at the 

same time be available locally 

whenever there is a requirement for 

complex implementations or when a 

problem arises. Gigas, with its local 

offices and personnel throughout Spain 

and Latin America, a proficient 

technical support team in Spanish, and 

other unparalleled services, it provides 

a significant advantage for its 

customers. 

Gigas was one of the first cloud 

providers who were awarded with the 

SAP “Infrastructure Operations 

Service” certification in 2014. Having 

gone through the process of certifying 

their platform and with the experience 

of having deployed dozens of SAP 

environments, Gigas knows how to 

optimize the platform so that the 

processes can run smoothly, efficiently 

and reliably. This triggers an 

improvement in performance, 

productivity, and corporate efficiency. 

In fact, their certifications and 

expertise have helped many of their 

existing customers to make the 

decision to migrate their SAP 

applications to the cloud. Cloud 

computing has solved and improved IT 

operations from different angles, but it 

also offers significant advantages to 

today’s companies. It is therefore easy 

to understand why Gigas platform 

became the solution of choice for many 

customers and SAP partners to deploy 

their SAP installations. 


Herrington Technology: 

Differentiated and Value-Driven SAP Delivery 

Valery Herrington 

Founder & CEO 

Today’s fast changing business solutions market includes dynamic 

factors like competition, efficiency, forecasting, collaboration, 

scalability, productivity, flexibility, customer service and 

streamlined processes. So, implementing ERP software, systems integration 

and project management has become a standard success route that ensures 

these capabilities are built-in to business operations. However, while 

implementing SAP ERP, the software, hardware and systems need to 

integrate with third-party solutions and tools. Herrington Technology, based 

in Manhattan, New York, is qualified to make sure that the implementation 

of all these aspects of advanced ERP solutions and systems integrations are 

operating top level. This U.S based powerhouse company also helps its 

customers with SAP S4/HANA installation, configuration, and 

implementation services along with unique, brand label capabilities that 

often lead the market sectors in one or more areas. 

Established Top SAP Provider: High Value 

Herrington Technology is a highly differentiated and value-driven business 

with established, certified SAP solutions and software. The firm specializes 

in the “best of breed” SAP ERP software and deployments. They have 

highly scalable capabilities that includes 

premier IBM SAP cloud services for 

rapid and top-level deployments. SAP 

niche Hotel for Business One software 

for businesses running in the hotel 

industry (luxury and standard), custom 

SAP partner development projects for 

showcase and on-demand code 

enhancements, niche system integration 

(SI) project go-live leadership, rare SAP 

project SWAT Team rescue capabilities 

and a full line of small to enterprise firm 

solution model with SAP when other 

organizations can’t deliver. The company 

owner also carries the weight of a highly 

mature active 30-year relationship with 

the SAP company. This business 

relationship generates extensive value for 

SAP customers and clients in the form of 

in-depth operational and in-network 

knowledge of how to navigate the ins and 

outs of SAP's unique business software 

release cycles, features upgrades, 

strategic roadmaps and organizational 

support channels for maximized 

customer success. The company also 

provides services for the newest SAP 

flagship platform, S/4HANA digital core. 

A Niche, Advanced Technology 

Enterprise 

Herrington Technology SAP business 

channel operates within a specialized 

multi-channel organization with 

Herrington Technology brand label 

services and solutions. This brings 

incredible differentiated brand value to 

customer delivery. Recently, this worldclass 

SAP-ERP software and solutions 

channel value has been further extended 

by a smart-minded leadership move of 


‘‘ 

We are committed to using the best tools and 

products for quality assurance 

‘‘ 

corporate headquarters to New York. 

With increased value for doing 

business from New York with clients 

around the globe, the company also 

now provides essential FinTech market 

capabilities crucial to the success and 

survivability of financial services 

sector. Other specialized brand label 

innovations extend the firm's niche 

beyond SAP ERP. 

Respected, Qualified Leadership 

A Manhattan-based visionary leader, 

Valery Herrington is the Founder and 

CEO of Herrington Technology. She 

has built the company from the ground 

up, that too during the worst economic 

condition since the great depression, 

which is a niche, advanced technology 

enterprise business today. Valery also 

holds a career designation of World’s 

Top SAP Technology Expert in 

cumulative expertise for a private 

practice owner-operator. She has also 

achieved degrees in Economics, 

German, Computer Science and a 

leading executive MBA degree with a 

specialized focus in business finance 

and digital technology for healthcare 

from John Hopkins Carey Business 

School. She earned recognition in 

industry as a “go-to” top expert for 

advanced, proprietary emerging big 

data VLDB and HPC systems and 

datacenter. She worked as a trusted 

advisor for “The A-list” of top IT firms 

located in the heart of Silicon Valley, 

CA. She is also pursuing her doctoral 

degree for advances in computer 

science and cybersecurity. 

Growing Quality and Recognition in 

Brand 

Herrington Technology is SAP EBM 

(Extended Business Member) certified 

which include many businesstechnology 

certifications. In addition, 

the firm has achieved recognition as an 

SAP Powerhouse and Top Most 

Promising SAP Provider firm. The firm 

also has an established business 

showcase on the Corporate web site 

that spotlights important client success 

stories, case studies and rare industry 

level delivery recognition for prior 

work and opportunities. The company 

actively stays on the leading edge 

providing value-driven solution 

packages and top-notch brand label. 

Success & A Challenging Industry 

The industry dynamics and client 

requirements for ERP business 

customers is a highly demanding, fastpaced 

IT marketplace. To keep pace 

with the continuous marketplace 

challenges Herrington Technology has 

quickly attained certified capabilities 

for the latest SAP flagship Solution, 

SAP S/4HANA for digital core. Brand 

excellence and new R&D innovations, 

cybersecurity, FinTech, data protection 

and more extends capability. 

Herrington Technology continues to 

meet other competitive challenges in 

industry by being open to new 

requirements that other vendors cannot 

complete. As a top SAP ERP provider 

they work in a valued, SAP global 

supply chain of $700 billion-dollars 

and growing. 

Taking A Step Up: Generating New 

Jobs of the Future 

Herrington Technology, roles and 

opportunities emerge from the staffing 

network and from internal 

requirements with new jobs. The 

company is actively working in 

innovative ways to provide new jobs 

of the future. 

Future with R&D Innovations 

The company is continuously working 

on the leading edge of the advanced 

technology front to provide customers 

and industry with high quality valuedriven 

business products and solutions. 

The firm’s established strong market 

position for SAP software, services and 

systems implementation leads the way 

for growing and clients seeking to run 

on the new SAP digital core: SAP S/4 

HANA. In addition, Herrington 

Technology organizational DNA 

continues to drive new R&D 

innovations, explore and develop 

completely new products and solutions 

for competitive advantage in superior 

customer delivery. Given today’s 

highly volatile and fluctuating global 

economy, this is a unique and 

important business hallmark. [Citation 

to professional announcement (public) 

SAP S/4HANA Launch, Mr. Bill 

McDermott, CEO of SAP SE, New 

York, Q1 2015.] 


SAP: 

Generating Business 

Value from Internet 

of Things 

Today, SAP is spiking in developing Internet of Things (IoT) applications 

and IoT services. SAP has a clear vision about the investment. There are 

three new IoT services which are aimed at helping enterprises to reduce 

costs and to develop IoT applications. The IT resource needs to manage IoT data, 

and derive business value from the same data. 

The IoT services are SAP Connected Goods, SAP Dynamic Edge Processing and 

SAP IoT Application Enablement. It appears that a solid IoT application 

environment with new IoT services is settled by SAP to the the foundations. 

IoT functionality is added in a smart way for the customers to build IoT solutions, 

with the help of SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). It is seen that IoT solutions in 

their real implementation differ substantially between deployments and need a 

platform as a service. Now SAP has to look forward towards the customer adoption 

validating the market viability of the IoT packages SAP has built. SAP’s IoT services 

offerings look good on an individual basis, but it may lack a coherent narrative. 

SAP’s IoT approach has come a long way in a couple of years. Many take advantage not 

only of HANA, but so called end-to-end scenarios that top into SAP's ERP strengths. A 

role can be played by SAP’s HCP for customers looking for IoT services and a platform 

to build on. But there should be more logical view of working of all these IoT initiatives 

together. It is very difficult from the outside to explain how they fit together into one 

value proposition for customers as there are a few groups in SAP that seem to have their 

hands in IoT projects. 

Vendors and their customers try to recognize whether IoT data can benefit their business or 

not. There are three aspects from which SAP access new products and challenges and they 

are machines, data origination and virtual modeling. 

Choice Making 

SAP Connected Goods is an HCP-based application. It is designed to help the businesses to 

manage and get value out of mass market devices and machines. The reason behind getting 

these goods is really interesting for the customers, because the value chain can be extended 


whether one is a manufacturer or OEM provider. Information can also be derived from these 

devices and have a lot more knowledge. 

It can be ensured that the machines are stocked adequately and the goods are stored properly 

from the data collected from the devices. It can also help identify relevant device trends and 

use patterns, and then set up rule-based alerts to replenish stock. SAP Connected Goods also 

includes built-in integration with SAP Business Objects Cloud, which enables the creation 

of customized dashboards for analytics. 

For example, take industrial coffee machines which are put in offices or stores. The type of 

coffee consumed can be measured and it can be known for what kind of coffee people 

consume from every machine, and then correlate that with location data. Now onwards, it 

can be figured out if there are patterns, like if people in rural areas consume different than 

urban areas or in different states. This allows spending the marketing money better in 

areas where one can know what they drink. There is no need to spend on fancy milk 

drinks if they, by and large,drink black coffee. 

Data Living on the Verge 

SAP Dynamic Edge Processing is designed in a way to help deal with the data flowing 

into organizations from billions of IoT connected devices and sensors. This enormous 

and growing volume of data can overwhelm the bandwidth needed to send the data to 

core processing centers. So the goal of SAP Dynamic Edge Processing is to process 

more data at the verge of enterprise network. This can reduce transmission costs and 

at the same time, conserving the real-time acumen derived from the data. 

A lot of the customers start small, with maybe a few hundred or thousand devices. 

But, eventually, it becomes a big data problem and then there is a need to filter data 

at the edge. This means not to transmit the data, save transmission costs and storage 


costs. So it is basically targeting the 

notion of handling large volumes of data 

and detects patterns at the edge where 

the data occurs. SAP Dynamic Edge 

Processing integrates business context 

information with IoT decision-making at 

the verge. It combines algorithms, 

syncing architecture and database 

technologies with features for device 

connectivity and many more. 

Model Demeanor for IoT 

SAP IoT Application Enablement 

provides a way to consume and manage 

IoT big data without any efforts to 

manage the underlying data storage. To 

create an enhanced virtual representation 

of the product, it combines sensor data, 

business data and contextual data. 

Combining an accurate virtual model of 

how a thing operates with real-time data 

collected by sensors allows detailed and 

realistic digital representations of a 

physical asset over its lifetime. 

If there is any reference implementation 

of how to handle coolers or coffee 

makers, there will be customers who say, 

‘My model of coffee maker is different, 

so I want the following attributes added.’ 

So, underneath all these models is 

something called a thing model, and the 

idea is to quickly whip up the next thing. 

Micro services are included in IoT 

Application Enablement for SAP HCP 

which allows other systems to retrieve 

enriched digital twin data, including 

business semantics, product master data 

hierarchy data and customer contact 

documentation. 

SAP IoT Application Enablement 

includes a software developer’s kit to 

build IoT applications faster by focusing 

on design, rather than coding for 

developing IoT applications. Built-in 

features also minimize the need to define 

data management by calculating 

aggregates, splitting data into warm and 

cold storage and applying data retention 

policies. 



SAP Cloud Platform and the Future 

of Development for SAP 

For a long time, many businesses viewed their IT 

departments as an overhead expense which kept 

the business running but didn’t add a lot of value 

to the bottom line. In recent years, this line of thinking 

has changed dramatically as there have been so many 

notable examples where technology innovations have 

completely disrupted a particular industry. This change in 

philosophy has caused companies to make commitments 

towards achieving digital transformation like never 

before. 

While such developments are exciting, this shift in 

philosophy has placed even more pressure on enterprise 

IT departments to deliver solutions in a fast and efficient 

way. While this is certainly a daunting task, the good 

news for SAP shops is that help is already here in the 

form of the SAP Cloud Platform. The remaining 

challenge is to figure out how to embrace this technology 

to achieve continuous integration going forward. 

Moving Towards Hybrid Landscapes 

One of the bigger challenges IT departments face today is 

that the enterprise landscape is becoming increasingly 

fragmented. In the old days, a company might decide to 

become an SAP shop and that decision strongly influenced 

the software purchasing habits of the business. Here, if a 

business need arose, the company would look to SAP to 

provide the solution they were looking for. If the solution 

was a perfect match, that’s great, but even if not, there were 

still advantages from an IT perspective to sticking with one 

vendor in terms of cohesiveness, tight integration, and 

familiarity. On the business side of these transactions 

however, these kinds of choices were oftentimes not very 

well-received. 

While a best-of-breeds approach may not be ideal from an 

IT perspective, individual departments want the solution 

that best matches their requirements. And now, with the 

advent of the cloud and a proliferation of SaaS offerings in 

the marketplace, these departments now have the freedom 

to purchase packaged software solutions without having to 

go through the IT department. Regardless of the 

circumstances, suffice it to say that the days of the 

monolithic landscape are numbered – even for companies 

that swear they’ll never take their ERP systems to the cloud. 

As the dust begins to settle on all these developments, 

enterprise IT departments are finding themselves left to 


About the Author 

James Wood, is the Principal Consultant of 

Bowdark Consulting, where his work domain 

includes being an architect and technologist in 

the enterprise software space. He has expertise 

in the development of custom software solutions 

using cloud-native, SAP, and Microsoft-based 

technologies. James’ extracurricular activities 

include blogging, writing, working with the SAP 

Mentor Community, and technology research. 

James Wood 

manage hybrid landscapes which combine on-premise 

systems with cloud-based systems. Whether these systems 

are provided by SAP or another vendor is largely 

immaterial since these systems are built using different 

technologies. For SAP developers, it’s not like the old days 

where everything was built on ABAP. Plus, when it comes 

to cloud-based solutions, developers are usually restricted 

from making changes anyway, so whatever programming 

language is used underneath the hood doesn’t really matter. 

Innovating Around the Edges 

More and more, companies are starting to realize that the 

safest bet for building new solutions is to move towards a 

centralized (and separate) cloud platform like the SAP 

Cloud Platform. Here, rather than using proprietary 

technologies like ABAP to customize solutions, innovation 

takes place around the edges with extension apps that 

access application functionality through well-defined 

RESTful interfaces (e.g. OData). This design-by-contract 

approach to extension app development simplifies the 

design and offers lots of long-term flexibility. 

To appreciate these differences, consider a typical web app 

built on SAP’s SAPUI5 framework (i.e. the toolkit used to 

create Fiori apps). If this app was developed on-premise, 

the basic component architecture would look something 

like what you see on the left-hand side of the figure below. 

Here, the front-end server is a standalone instance of SAP 

Gateway and the back-end server might be SAP S/4 HANA 

or an older SAP Business Suite system. 

Now, let’s imagine that the app is so successful that the 

business wants to be able to access the app in different 

ways. Here, there might be a desire to access the app on 

mobile devices/tablets. Or, perhaps the business wants to 

share this app with business partners via a self-service 

portal. In a traditional on-premise scenario, these might be 

difficult requirements to address due to a variety of 

restrictions around change management, hardware 

procurement/installation, and so forth. 

The diagram on the right-hand side of the figure above 

shows how moving the app to SAP Cloud Platform changes 

this scenario quite a bit. In this case, data is still securely 

accessed via the SAP Cloud Connector component, but the 

app is hosted in an environment that offers all the services 

needed to expose the app to mobile devices, self-service 

portals, and more. Plus, the IT infrastructure team no longer 

has to worry about maintaining the front-end server or 

ancillary servers that might be needed. 

Outlook 

The examples described here barely scratch the surface of 

what’s possible with centralized PaaS solutions like SAP 

Cloud Platform. The point in all this though is that the only 

way to keep pace with digital transformation demands is to 

provide developers with an environment that allows them to 

focus squarely on solving business problems and get out of 

the business of worrying about mundane proprietary details, 

environmental/scaling issues, and so forth. 

This trend is not unique to SAP; you see it across the 

industry with other major vendors moving towards cloudnative 

designs. The benefits in terms of scalability and 

flexibility are too great to ignore, so we see this as a trend 

that’s here to stay. So, the next time you’re thinking about 

building a new app, maybe it’s time to see what SAP Cloud 

Platform can do to transform your business. 


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Spinnaker Support: 

Exceptional third party support and managed services for SAP 

Matt Stava, CEO 

Matt Stava founded Spinnaker 

Support in 2008 and has served as the 

Chief Executive Officer since inception. 

Initially an executive leading supply 

practices for internationally recognized 

supply chain consultancies, Matt realized 

that SAP and Oracle users were seeking 

better support with significant savings. 

Under Matt's leadership, Spinnaker 

Support has grown by 40% annually 

since 2008 by proving SAP users can 

receive high quality software support 

services with less cost and then invest 

those savings in their technology vision. 

Matt Stava 

Founder & CEO 

n the digital age, business leaders must stay on top of new, emerging, 

Iand future technologies or risk falling behind. But where do you start? 

You are undoubtedly already exploring the latest digital trends to 

identify the best options for your organization. But, how will you ever 

implement these options with so much of your IT budget earmarked for 

maintenance of on-premise software applications? Spinnaker Support is a 

leading third-party provider of SAP maintenance and support. Spinnaker 

Support SAP services are a solution to a company’s continuously pressing 

business problem – how to get real value out of annual software support 

while taking control of its technology roadmap. Spinnaker Support service 

delivers the same set of software break/fix, tax and regulatory, general use, 

and vulnerability management support one gets from SAP’s self-service 

model and improves upon it through a full service, highly personalized 

delivery model with significant savings. Their customers scored their thirdparty 

SAP support at nearly 99% in the latest customer satisfaction survey. 

In addition to third-party support, they uniquely add high value application 

and technical managed services for their SAP clients. They are the fastest 

growing provider of SAP third-party support and managed services in the 

industry (39.4% sales growth in FY 2016). 

Under Matt’s vision and subsequent 

execution, Spinnaker Support only hires 

the most experienced and proven 

software engineers, with substantial 

application and surrounding technology 

stack expertise. The team consistently 

follows ISO 9001:2015 standards and 

avoids shortcuts that infringe on the 

intellectual property rights of others. In 

May of 2012, Spinnaker Support 

launched the SAP Support Division. 

Umpteen benefits for the clients 

Spinnaker Support customers gain expert 

and personalized annual software support 

service; tremendous annual savings; 

freedom to choose their own path of 

technology innovation. Spinnaker 

Support is providing a range of services 

that customers respect and embrace. 

Their SAP customers span 87 countries 

and they support 305 instances of SAP 

software, ranging from R/3 through 

ECC6. The company currently supports 

more than 120 SAP products, including 

BusinessObjects and HANA Database. 

Additionally, Spinnaker Support is 


‘‘ 

Delivering cutting-edge, fast return-on-investment 

SAP support, advisory, and managed services 

for a fraction of the cost 

maintaining Oracle’s Runtime 

Database for many of its SAP 

clients. 

The majority of their SAP customers 

leverage their third-party support 

offering – which is comprised of 

software break fixes, tax and regulatory 

updates, general inquiry support, and a 

range of technology advisory services 

designed to ensure interoperability in 

dynamic environments, application 

security, and virtualization. Most 

customers embrace their support 

engineers as a part of their own 

internal IT team and trust their 

independent guidance regarding goforward 

initiatives for cloud migration, 

transformation, and digitalization. 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained 

SAP is increasingly using audits and 

indirect access as tactics to optimize 

revenue and retain support customers. 

They have also modified their standard 

licensing agreements, which can 

complicate the cancellation process. 

Spinnaker Support engages 

independent partners to help SAP users 

navigate through these barriers. SAP’s 

push to the cloud, which is widely 

regarded as not ready for prime time, 

can complicate transitions to thirdparty 

support as well – but often serves 

as a push to an alternative support 

model. 

The best-laid plans 

Industry analysts agree that cloud-first 

thinking will continue to dominate IT 

executive strategies but most SAP 

users are waiting for SAP cloud 

offerings to further materialize. This 

could take years. So, those same 

analysts project that the third-party 

support market will remain a strong 

support alternative to enable the 

long-term vision at least through 2030. 

Spinnaker Support offers a smart range 

of managed services and consulting. 

Organizations that run SAP are seeking 

that single vendor to provide more 

services – to reduce costs and to shrink 

the number of service providers they 

are using today which is offered by 

Spinnaker Support. 

Spinnaker Support is signing new 

partnerships to supplement their 

capabilities in emerging areas like 

application security, performance 

monitoring and tuning, and cloud/SaaS 

support. Database optimization is a key 

area where they will continue to invest. 

The more robust their service 

capabilities, the better they will 

compete and win going forward. Their 

service mix will morph over time but 

their commitment to delivering expert 

service will not. 

Experts on the cutting edge of SAP 

Spinnaker Support has hired experts 

who are on the cutting edge of SAP 

and surrounding stack technology. The 

cloud isn’t ready for the vast majority 

of SAP shops and they are looking to 

vendors like Spinnaker Support for 

cost savings that can help fund the 

cloud when it is ready and also to 

‘‘ 

coach and advise them on the best path 

to the cloud. They are experts in this 

field and stay abreast of the latest and 

greatest to ensure that they are top of 

mind for SAP users. 

Integrating all essential parameters 

to be competent 

Firstly, Spinnaker Support focuses on 

providing unique, high value services 

to current SAP customers which retain 

them and makes them referenceable. 

Secondly, Spinnaker Support is 

increasingly communicating with 

prospects, industry influencers from 

analyst firms like Gartner and 

Forrester, and with the IT journalist 

community. Awareness and education 

is a key ingredient to their success. 

Thirdly, Spinnaker Support is 

expanding into emerging markets. Last 

year they launched an operation in 

Israel, a highrowth area for third-party 

support. In 2017, they have opened 

operations in strategic markets such as 

South Korea and Russia. 

Finally, Spinnaker Support always 

delivers support the right way – 

avoiding the violation of the 

intellectual property rights of others. 


Xpandion: 

Ongoing Improvement of the SAP System 

Transformation of Xpandion from 

2007 

Xpandion was founded in 2007. It’s been 

10 years that the company is 

fundamentally providing user access 

control in a unified cloud and 

on-premises environment, controlling 

ERP security and authorizations, 

optimizing SAP licensing, and along with 

it is easily maintaining GRC and 

Segregation of Duties (SoD) compliance. 

Xpandion is a fair and responsive 

employer who respects their employee’s 

needs and provides them with a safe and 

enjoyable workplace. 

Moshe Panzer 

Founder & CEO 

Every established company is disciplined by their good management, 

staff members and the implementation that has been executed at the 

right time in a perfect way. We often think of exactly how such 

companies raise values in the industries at such an early stage. Well, the 

only thing which we need to focus on is- Never Give Up! No matter how 

tough the path you come across or how much savings you put on a portal, 

one should always believe that a miracle will soon happen in your life. This 

is how the team at Xpandion dreamt off when they lit up an idea that 

enlightened the company with numerous clients. 

Xpandion is a leading provider of ERP usage inspection solutions, 

delivering unprecedented real-time visibility into SAP and non-SAP 

systems, significantly improving security, optimizing licensing usage and 

enabling GRC/SOX compliance. Available in cloud or on-premises, 

Xpandion Profile Tailor Dynamics suite is implemented rapidly and does 

not require any changes for monitoring systems. They work hard to update 

their software consistently in order to keep up with the most current 

industry standards and the constant changes, including SoD, ISO and 

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

Xpandion is constantly investing time 

and resources in researching new 

technologies and incorporating them into 

the software. Xpandion software is 

mobile-friendly, supports in-memory 

capabilities for better performance and 

uses the newest development standards. 

As one of the first companies to embrace 

cloud-technology for enterprise software, 

Xpandion offers both on-premises and a 

cloud-version of its software, giving 

customers the ability to choose the most 

suitable solution for their organization 

and to move between solutions according 

to their current and future business needs. 

Xpandion’s approach to sales is a bit 

different than others. The company’s 

main motto is to give value to each of its 

customers and provide them ultimate 

satisfaction. This is the reason that in 

some cases, organizations will approach 

Xpandion and will receive advice on 

whether or not Xpandion’s product is a 

good fit for them. 

Customer Care Makes Xpandion 

Unique 

Ideas are often one and the same, but 


‘‘ 

SAP customers should understand what’s going on 

inside their systems and what their users are really 

doing – and we supply the software to do that! 

being able to understand and solve 

customer issues and ultimately 

implement solutions makes the 

company shine even in the dark. 

Xpandion, which is a leading company 

in the ERP industry, maintains its 

unique stature only because of the 

expert services and company 

management. Together with its partners 

globally, Xpandion provides software 

solutions for increasing SAP Security 

and controlling SAP Authorizations, 

which is also a strong infrastructure for 

performing multi-platform role 

redesign projects. 

Later, they also started providing 

ProfileTailor License Auditor, which 

delivers real-time visibility of actual 

SAP license usage and simplifies 

licensing models, enabling better 

management of licenses and achieving 

full control of SAP usage. 

LicenseAuditor also monitors usage of 

SAP software engines and 

recommends the right license for each 

one. Last but not least, LicenseAuditor 

monitors licensing risks like duplicate 

logins and Indirect access, which can 

result in high licensing costs if not 

treated before an audit. 

Xpandion is also on the peak of the 

compliance market by providing 

ProfilesTailor GRC which enables 

compliance with GRC/SOX and SoD 

requirements, identifying violations on 

static and dynamic levels of granting 

authorizations to users, supporting 

authorization related processes and 

solving violations from SoD rules. 

Xpandion's unique technology enables 

customers to find the best authorization 

role to grant to users in a matter of 

seconds, and to really solve SoD 

conflicts instead of just creating 

compensating controls. 

Xpandion customers are at ease 

knowing that their products are 

certified by SAP and that they will 

continue to get value from Xpandion 

for years. Xpandion products hold two 

certifications in the SAP world – one 

for SAP ECC Netweaver and one for 

SAP S/4 HANA, which promises 

customers full support for their 

existing SAP products and also for 

their future ones. Xpandion is 

continuously in contact with SAP to 

ensure that the software is compliant 

with SAP's next steps and directions. 

Not a boss, but a leader of Xpandion 

Moshe Panzer, Founder & CEO of 

Xpandion has over 20 years of 

impressive experience in the SAP 

industry and is recognized as an SAP 

expert. Moshe has also contributed his 

skillful knowledge to the position of 

Project Advisor and Project Leader for 

large private multinational corporations 

and small startups. Additionally, he 

was also a proud senior SAP consultant 

before commencing Xpandion in 2007. 

Including Xpandion, Moshe diligently 

established three software companies. 

Having graduated from the Technion 

and Clark University, Moshe strongly 

believes that he has an ability to 

improve the lives of people through 

software solutions. This keeps him 

charged to develop more software and 

to help numerous individuals and 

organizations. Moshe restlessly looks 

to forage those organizations that are 

still working manually on those tasks 

‘‘ 

which could be easily executed with a 

few clicks of the mouse and having the 

intelligent software behind the scenes 

doing all the hard work. 

Sharpening on Future Challenges 

Xpandion is persistently working on 

their development to self-upgrade the 

system through planned changes and 

updating its applications with the 

changes in the industry. Xpandion’s 

software uniquely operates inside 

customer’s premises on a private cloud 

or in a secured public cloud as well. 

Due to customer requests, the software 

supports multiple SAP products, 

including SAP Business Objects and 

SAP Success Factors, and also 

non-SAP products like Microsoft 

Active Directory, Exchange, 

Sharepoint, Infor M3, Microsoft 

Dynamics AX, Microsoft Navision and 

SalesForce. 

The company also aims to provide the 

best services and develop the best 

product for each of their clients. They 

are methodical, diligent and attentive 

to the small details. This gives an 

organization the ability to upgrade their 

core software easily as well as 

continuously acquire new features and 

capabilities. Xpandion and its partners 

provide a great customized solution 

with impeccable services and this is 

what makes them unique from the 

competitors in the industry.

The 10 Most Valuable SAP Solution Providers 2017

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