The Customer Magazine 1|2010

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Need to Get Users Excited About Software
Following its new mantra of solutions with instant value, SAP is transforming itself to be faster and more customer-oriented. SAP Spectrum talks with Jim Hagemann Snabe to find out how the company aims to achieve this.
Touching Lives With Technology
Some of the people who work the phones for Deutsche Post DHL’s human resources hotline are blind. Along with special resources for the visually impaired, they use the SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution to carry out their daily tasks.
Grabbing the Tiger by the Tail
The financial crisis, the drive toward internationalization, and SAP Enterprise Support services were three topics weighing heavily on the minds of SAP user companies in Japan last year.

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05.01.2010

IT Business Trends 2010

By: Frank Völkel

Smartphone apps that can access company data, graphical data analysis, energy-efficient data centers, enterprise clouds and smart energy grids: These will be the most important trends of 2010.

IT 2010 - smart, mobile and energy-efficient (graphics: grasundsterne)

You could almost call it an omnipresence of data. In the future, employees will continue to collaborate on spreadsheets, presentations, blueprints, and other projects over the Internet. What colleagues prepare in Europe can be completed elsewhere in the world; that’s the sign of a global company. Smartphones and portable computers enable users to access finished documents and data, such as when working on-location with customers. Orders and change requests immediately enter a centralized database, which may be located in a cloud. Ideas that were the stuff of pure fiction just a few years ago are gradually finding their way into the everyday business world.

It is already becoming clear that the Internet will shift more and more to mobile devices, leaving fixed desktop computers with less of a role to play. The statistics ascertained by the market researchers at Gartner bear out this trend: Smartphones already account for 14% of the entire mobile telephone sector, and this number is set to grow to 38% by the year 2013. Users are accessing the Internet less and less through portals alone, turning instead to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter – a development of particular interest to companies.

Just in time for the start of the new year, market researchers and consulting companies like Euromonitor, iSupply, IDC, MDR Instat, and the aforementioned Gartner have published their forecasts for 2010. Join us in venturing a look at the five trends we consider key in business IT.