Transformation for SAP and its customers

In an interview Wednesday at the Newtown Square headquarters of the German company's North American subsidiary, SAP America Inc. SAP America Inc. Latest from The Business Journals Afterwards acquisitions, SAP no longer enterprise resource planning companySAP AG buying Ariba Inc. for .3 billionMass. Gov. Patrick names 11 to advise on state innovation buys Follow this company , McBride said SAP is going through a transformation from being a developer of enterprise resource planning software to a supplier of a multitude of IT products and services meant to help its clients improve their business operations.

The depressed economy is a big reason for that

The depressed economy is a big reason for that, nevertheless the rapid changes in information innovation over the past few years as well are playing a part.

Those changes include the explosion in the use of smart phones and tablet computers; the growing acceptance of cloud computing; when all is said and done-called big data technologies, just as SAP's Hana, that enable near immediate extraction of useful information from massive amounts of data. And they have IT users demanding something that would have been impossible even late last decade.

One such customer is Burberry Group plc, the London maker and marketer of luxury clothing and accessories. A seven-year customer of SAP's ERP software, it has been working with SAP on research that will enable its sales reps to know the buying history of every customer, as so then as the actions they've taken with regards to Burberry on social media, as in the near future as they walk into one of its stores.