As companies and governments face challenges around sovereignty, security and competitiveness, they need to embrace approaches that initially appear contradictory: investing boldly despite limited resources, sharing data while protecting it and competing while collaborating. These are not contradictions – this is the new operating model.

Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that organizations must adopt a three-pillar approach to navigate this new normal of paradoxes.

First, they must ground themselves in flexible digital foundations; second, embed AI deeply and responsibly into their operations; and third, view collaboration as a strategic advantage rather than a compromise.

These principles form the backbone of a sustainable way of working in the Intelligent Age, where progress depends on navigating paradoxes with agility and shared purpose.

Laying the foundation for flexibility

Progress is moving at breakneck speed. Technologies that seemed futuristic yesterday are mainstream today and by tomorrow, they could even be obsolete. To keep pace, organizations need a foundation that is rigid but adaptable – a platform that can evolve as quickly as the world around it.

That foundation is the cloud. A cloud migration is more than an IT project: it is the digital foundation for a thorough modernization of the entire enterprise, for moving from “good “to “great.”

Modern cloud infrastructure enables data, applications and AI to interoperate seamlessly, creating an environment where innovation can flourish. It accelerates the deployment of software updates and new applications, reduces complexity and provides the scalability needed to respond to shifting demands.

True flexibility, however, goes beyond technology. Organizations must foster a mindset that embraces change, encourages experimentation and prioritizes resilience over perfection. This means empowering teams to adapt quickly, learn continuously and view change as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Drive AI innovation on your terms

As AI rapidly reshapes how we live, study and work, no organization can afford to ignore it, yet many still have questions about how to apply it.

In the business-to-business realm, AI cannot be treated as a standalone technology. To unleash its full potential, AI must be deeply embedded in business processes. This requires three pillars:

• Modern cloud software
• Advanced data management
• A consistent stack of AI technologies

Companies that move from legacy on-premises software to integrated cloud applications unlock AI’s ability to access, understand and facilitate transactions across the enterprise. This enables AI agents to function as digital coworkers, capable of executing complex workflows spanning the business.

The power AI offers is undeniable and in today’s volatile world, this often leads to questions around digital sovereignty. True digital sovereignty is about maintaining control over critical data and assets while leveraging the best technologies available in line with national interests.

Data protection and compliance are non-negotiable. Companies and governments must ensure that sensitive information remains under appropriate jurisdictional control.

Internationally aligned sovereignty standards – such as ISO (​​International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) – would enable secure, compliant scaling across borders, unlocking the full potential of AI without compromising trust.

Not all data requires the same level of protection. Information essential to national security or public safety requires the highest levels of control. At the same time, less sensitive data can be managed in trusted cloud environments that comply with recognized cybersecurity standards.

This nuanced approach allows organizations to balance innovation with responsibility.

Compete with collaboration

The paradox of competition and collaboration is perhaps the most striking of all. In a hyperconnected world, no company or government can tackle today’s challenges alone. Cybersecurity threats, climate change and economic inequality are global issues that demand collective solutions.

The competitive advantage now lies in partnerships – across industries, sectors and borders. Public-private collaboration is essential to co-create AI use cases, build open ecosystems and invest in digital education. Such partnerships are strategic imperatives that strengthen our society and our economy for long-term growth.

Collaboration also extends to governance. Establishing shared frameworks for ethical AI, data privacy and sustainability will require dialogue among stakeholders with competing interests. Yet, this dialogue is the cornerstone of progress.

Dialogue: the operating principle

While the opportunities AI provides are immense, they are by no means guaranteed. The determining factor will be our ability to engage in meaningful dialogue – as companies and governments, technology experts and policy-makers, innovators and citizens.

In the Intelligent Age, the question is not whether we will face paradoxes, but how we face them. Dialogue must be our operating principle – the means through which we reconcile paradoxes, build trust and chart a course toward shared prosperity. The future will belong to those who embrace complexity, act with courage and collaborate across divides.

Christian Klein is CEO and member of the Executive Board of 51·çÁ÷SE.

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From my work at a company that pioneers AI in business processes, I hold this hope too: AI has the potential to stimulate growth and make companies more productive. It can make economies more resilient by helping businesses navigate disruptions, whether through global trade crises, natural disasters, or regional conflicts.

AI can also play a critical role in our ability to achieve our sustainability goals, tackle climate change, and mitigate its impact. While many recognize AI’s positive potential, the growing fragmentation of our world greatly reduces our ability to take full advantage of the opportunities AI presents.

AI can only be as good as the data it can access and work with. The more restrictions, limitations, and political borders we impose on it, the less positive impact AI can have in our countries and companies. AI can’t thrive in a fragmented world. This is what I call the AI progress challenge.

Tackling the AI Progress Challenge, Step by Step

Finding solutions to something as vast and as complex as global fragmentation requires us to divide the problem into smaller, individual challenges that are easier to overcome. How can we make AI a stronger tool for progress? How can we navigate the AI progress challenge step by step?

1. Begin at company-level

It starts on our doorsteps — at the level of the individual company. Cloud migration is an integral first step. The cloud makes data accessible for AI, systematically and comprehensively, and cloud solutions can easily — even automatically — be kept up to date with the latest AI innovations. What is more, integrated cloud software offers a standardized environment for data and processes. It makes it easier for companies to keep their data structured, clean, and coherent across the company — and consequently easier for AI applications to use.

2. Create an industrial ecosystem

The second step toward maximizing the potential of AI is to bring individual companies together in an industrial ecosystem. To become more productive, resilient, and sustainable, companies need to exchange information with suppliers — sometimes thousands of them — as well as with their clients and innovation partners. In the age of business AI, the need to build intelligent business networks is more important than ever. The more broadly and widely data can be shared between companies, the better and more impactful AI outcomes can be. The whole ecosystem profits in terms of added competitiveness and innovation power.

3. Build international frameworks

The third step is to build international frameworks that allow AI innovation to thrive in a responsible way. Governments and regulators can reduce unnecessary barriers to the exchange of data within countries and between countries. In cooperation with industry, public actors can also work towards aligning and harmonizing technological regulations wherever possible, especially between the key economic powers of North America, China, and Europe.

At the same time, we must build trust. Lack of trust is perhaps the greatest driver of global fragmentation — and the biggest obstacle to collaboration. By joining forces, international companies can agree on common rules for data usage, data privacy, and responsible, ethical AI. Such “confederations of trust” encourage more frequent data sharing.

Putting the AI Puzzle Together

The cloud, business networks, and a more harmonized global environment based on trust; each of these steps reduces fragmentation and increases federation. And, each of these steps can help the organizations involved reap much greater benefits from AI.

It’s like putting together a 10,000-piece puzzle. It’s not easy to start with and it’s not something that can be accomplished in one go, but if we begin by putting a handful of pieces into place, the big picture gradually emerges. As the degree of federation increases, progress accelerates.

It’s on us to put the AI puzzle together and reduce fragmentation, one step at a time. This is how we maximize the potential of AI — not just for some, but for many.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.

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Today, we’re at a revolutionary moment of similar proportions. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from niche technology to a topic of global discussion within little more than a year. It has happened at a critical moment, with the world facing multiple geopolitical, economic, and climate crises.

While these challenges urgently require our attention, global human, environmental, and financial resources are already stretched. Generative AI, however, offers hope that we can address all these competing priorities simultaneously. In other words, we’ll be able to achieve more with less.

Accelerating Change

The enormous potential of generative AI is widely acknowledged, yet there is one key area where its impact for good has yet to be fully realized. If we apply generative AI to how we run business — as a tool to transform companies, supply chains, and entire industries — we’ll accelerate the evolution of our world economy into one that is more sustainable, resilient, equitable, and prosperous.

Generative AI for business can, for example, help find better and faster solutions to the questions millions of organizations around the world face today. For example:

• What steps do I need to take to make my company carbon neutral?
• How can I improve the availability of critical supplies?
• What can I do to make my business more productive and competitive?
• How do we skill and reskill our workforce to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow?

Relying on the recommendations provided by generative AI for such critical matters, however, requires the underlying technology to be extremely trustworthy — much more so than in the consumer application space.

Building Trust in AI

Trustworthy means, first, that generative AI for business has to be relevant. AI can only be as good as the data it is trained on, and the generic data used for today’s most famous large language models (LLMs) will not help companies address their very granular problems. To provide context-specific proposals, relevant AI for business must train and work with real-life enterprise data.

Second, generative AI for business has to be reliable. The stakes in business can be very high: single decisions can affect thousands of customers, colleagues, and the company’s long-term future. That’s why business AI outputs must be provided with the greatest accuracy and quality. And, while AI “hallucinations” may be entertaining in the consumer world, they’re a no-go in business.

Third, generative AI for business has to be responsible. There is an ongoing discussion about how AI models trained on and working with public Internet data may infringe on privacy and copyright regulations. In the business world, this kind of “gray zone” mode of operation is unthinkable.

For businesses to trust generative AI, they need to be sure their data is handled safely and confidentially. They need to be sure that generative AI tools respect and observe data privacy, data ownership, and data access restrictions by their very design, and that they operate only in areas where explicit consent has been given.

These three “R”s — relevance, reliability, responsibility — are the cornerstones of trustworthy AI for the business world. They are also key to building trust in technology as a tool to tackle the biggest challenges of our time.

A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity

As a global software company, 51·çÁ÷has made relevant, reliable, and responsible AI a top strategic priority, training and working with real-life business data based on the explicit consent of thousands of customers. By design, it follows the access and privacy settings already built into 51·çÁ÷databases and software.

The  is ensured by clear guiding principles, internal governance structures, and an advisory panel of external experts. Most importantly, 51·çÁ÷is pushing the quality of generative AI results to be not just “good enough,” but to have the integrity and quality customers expect when they make consequential business decisions.

I believe there is also a once-in-a-generation opportunity on a larger scale: nations and regions that pioneer trustworthy AI for business will see a much faster and broader adoption of generative AI across companies and industries. They will reap the benefits of greater competitiveness, resilience, and sustainability. And they will contribute immensely to a better running world — much like the World Wide Web did three decades ago.

Christian Klein is CEO and a member of the Executive Board of 51·çÁ÷SE.

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What we consistently hear is that a growing company needs the ability to scale without increasing costs and complexity. The last few years have also clearly shown how crucial agility is to any company’s success. In other words: growth cannot come at the expense of agility, and vice versa.

Whether a company has simply reached a point where its current technology or systems aren’t keeping up, or it has made a fundamental business model change — for example by shifting from selling products to selling a subscription service — at some stage, companies find they need to pivot to a more scalable and more capable solution. That is when they turn to cloud ERP.

51·çÁ÷understands what it takes to help customers realize value from adopting cloud ERP. Based on our highly successful RISE with 51·çÁ÷offering, 51·çÁ÷is now launching a new offering for midsize customers to harness the proven benefits of cloud ERP: GROW with SAP.

GROW with SAP: Adopt cloud ERP with speed, predictability, and continuous innovation

Designed specifically to help midsize companies take full advantage of cloud ERP and all the benefits that cloud solutions offer, GROW with 51·çÁ÷gives customers the confidence that they will be up and running quickly with technology that allows them to keep growing effectively and efficiently.

For more than 50 years, 51·çÁ÷has worked hand in hand with customers across every industry to benchmark and define best-in-class industry-specific processes. With GROW with SAP, companies can immediately adopt these pre-configured, industry best practices, while embedded AI and automation capabilities enable customers to see rapid results in time and cost efficiency, not just effectiveness.

Every company has unique differentiators that cloud ERP can support. With GROW with SAP, we provide a business technology platform where customers can define their own apps and processes in a cloud-native way. Together with our partners, we have built thousands of unique processes for customers that work with SAP’s cloud ERP. And because we recognize that business experts know their business process needs best, we also enable them to create unique processes and create the solutions they need without having to write code.

Businesses require the agility to add new products, services, and customers — and they need a technology solution that can keep pace with their development. As a company that already supports the world’s largest enterprises, at SAP, we know that our cloud ERP can scale to support even the most extensive product lines, complex service offerings, and ambitious sustainability goals.

The GROW with 51·çÁ÷offering also features services and tools to streamline delivery at a fixed rate that delivers a technical go-live in as little as four to six weeks and gives customers the assurance of the rapid time to value they need. Midsize customers adopting GROW with 51·çÁ÷also have access to a global community of experts and free learning resources designed to ensure they see meaningful business results.

When it comes to , it’s just as important to consider where you want your business to be as where it is today. And while GROW with 51·çÁ÷is tailored to the immediate needs of midmarket companies, it also provides the agility and innovation midsize companies need for success in years to come.

Today’s cloud ERP is designed for the growth companies, and we are excited to watch a new set of customers GROW with SAP.

Christian Klein is CEO and a member of the Executive Board of 51·çÁ÷SE.

Today’s world is characterized by economic and non-economic disruptions that are deeply intertwined: volatile markets, inflation, geopolitical tensions and war, the energy crisis, and climate change. No one business, government, or society can tackle challenges on this scale alone.

To reunite our fragmented world, we must change — both within our own four walls and beyond — and technology plays a key role in this.

Business Models: From Analogue Companies to Intelligent Enterprises

Faced with strong fluctuations in supply and demand, dynamic purchasing behavior and growing pressure to innovate, companies recognize the need to become more agile and resilient. But for many, fragmented process landscapes prevent them from reacting quickly to change. Data is often stored in silos and so is not equally available to all decision-makers.

Digitalization and the automation of core processes end-to-end is not only a competitive advantage, it is critical to an organization’s survival. This is not about replacing people with tech. It’s about giving people back the freedom to do what they do best: be creative. With reliable data and the help of artificial intelligence (AI), companies are better able to keep track of what is happening in their business and why. This not only makes them more efficient, but also more flexible and faster, especially in times of crisis.

However, it is no longer enough to be resilient as an individual company. This is just the first step toward a new way of doing business.

Supply Chains: From Linear Connections to Transparent Business Networks

Globalization has made our supply chains more complex and, as a result, also more vulnerable. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, about . Climate change, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and geopolitical tensions worldwide have shown the limits of our current economic models, with the impact of this hitting the agricultural, energy, and hi-tech industries particularly hard.

Resilient supply chains have, therefore, become a priority, and technology the enabler — where linear one-to-one connections are prone to disruptions, networks of many-to-many connections allow companies to collaborate with partners along their value chain and exchange data in real-time. The 360-degree transparency across the entire value chain provides businesses with the flexibility and resilience to navigate even in the most dynamic environments. They can anticipate risks and manage sourcing, trading, and distribution all the way to the consumer. They can optimize inventories, match supply and demand, and identify bottlenecks before they even occur. In case of supply chain disruptions, companies can quickly select alternative or more sustainable suppliers.

The future belongs to companies that understand how to operate profitably, resiliently, and sustainably together with their ecosystem. And this mindset, the understanding of the power of ecosystems, is one of the most important prerequisites for solving global challenges.

Sustainability: From Image Driver to Social and Economic Imperative

The recent  (WMO) shows that the past eight years have been the warmest on record. The sea level rise rate has doubled since 1993, with the increase over the past two-and-a-half years accounting for 10% of the total increase over the past 30 years. In addition, with growing sociopolitical pressure and increasing social inequality, the importance of sustainability is changing.

Business leaders feel the urgency from all sides. Investor awareness around global challenges such as climate change, pollution, and inequality have increased, as has customer demand by a factor of seven from 2021 to 2022. Employees are making career choices based on their employer’s sustainability commitments and track record while governments are introducing new regulations. Sustainability, therefore, needs to become the North Star of every company, an integral part of the corporate strategy.

There is no business without sustainable business, and when it comes to the planet, the connection between digital and climate is fundamental to solve human problems. Promoting digital solutions for energy efficiency, scope 3 transparency, circularity, and carbon data sharing — in collaborative networks led by industry leaders and climate coalitions — will become a powerful blueprint for future sustainable business strategy, particularly in high-emission sectors like energy, materials, and mobility.

Ultimately, collaboration and networks are at the heart of the solutions to our global challenges. In a business network, companies can not only measure environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) in their own company, but across their whole value chains. They record verified data based on actuals, not averages. They can report against a quickly evolving set of ESG standards and, most importantly, they can act beyond ambitious targets by embedding sustainability across all of their business processes and value chains. This enables companies to create fair and safe working environments, reduce waste, and decarbonize the entire value chain (scope 1-3) — providing the basis of the circular economy. At the end of the day, companies are only as sustainable and resilient as their ecosystems.

In an increasingly fragmented world where global challenges threaten to divide us, technology plays a vital role in bringing us together.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.
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Decisions based on sustainability principles are crucial to navigate today’s complexities, cope with near-term strains, and adapt to a changing global system — all while creating the foundation for growth in the years ahead.

There are three concepts that leaders must prioritize as they chart their course to sustainable business:

1) Accelerate Renewable Energy Use

Europe is reliant on fossil fuels. Prior to the war in Ukraine, Europe imported about 40% of its gas and more than a quarter of its oil from Russia. While the EU has turned its back on Russian coal, it is struggling to agree on how and how much to boycott Russian oil and gas. Many countries are looking for alternative sources, with the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and other producers filling the gap.

The industrial sector uses about 54% of the , more than any other sector. More than is still produced by fossil fuels. It is clear that in the short term. The war will likely extend fossil fuel use, putting the timeline to reach net-zero emissions at risk. If we are to avoid slowing or reversing our progress toward our net-zero goals, the private sector must accelerate its transition to renewable energy use.

Renewable energy costs have decreased dramatically over the past 20 years, and use has increased accordingly. However, to achieve a secure, sustainable, and economically feasible energy system, government and business leaders need to work together to form policy and finance environments that encourage rapid uptake. , coupled with energy-efficiency solutions, are essential to reduce emissions.

Companies must  and support the deployment of renewable energy sources, which are largely domestic, safer, more secure, and less costly at scale. To this end, they can prioritize self-produced energy or commit to using 100% renewable electricity. They can form partnerships to develop renewable energy infrastructure projects, and join coalitions like the RE100.

2) Participate in Collaborative Networks

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased the instabilities of global supply chains and intensified the scarcity of important resources. Developing stable, reliable, and sustainable supply chains require data-rich, . These networks will provide the transparency to better manage resource availability, offer essential products and services, address unethical conduct, and reduce environmental impacts.

For example, more than 30% of worldwide food produced is lost or wasted because of inaccurate demand calculations or transport issues. Ukraine has large lithium oxide deposits. With batteries being the most expensive part of electric vehicles, rising prices of nickel and lithium can slow market adoption.

The conflict may also give rise to unethical labor practices, making monitoring human rights and working conditions across supply chains crucial. With sustainability-centered planning and technologies, governments, companies, and NGOs are better prepared to manage crisis response; for example, in case of natural disasters or social emergencies.

Industry data networks like Catena-X and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development Carbon Transparency Pathfinder enable companies to manage sustainability performance across supply chains. This includes materials sourcing, accumulated carbon emissions in products, and reusability at a product’s end-of-cycle.

3) Leverage Sustainable Finance

Business leaders often assume that being more sustainable means being less profitable. . Transforming to a low-carbon, low-waste, low-inequality economy and leveraging  represents a massive opportunity.

The capital markets are greening. Sustainable bonds are surging, and a majority are now corporate issuers. Sustainable lending grew by 300% last year. Companies with sustainable credentials are increasingly becoming targets for M&A deals. Despite equity market swings, equity values of sustainable companies were up 46% on average in 2021.

Financing the transition to sustainable companies and economies means business leaders must move away from prioritizing only shareholder returns to a broad set of stakeholders, including employees, communities, customers, partners, regulators, and, importantly, nature. Sustainable finance can accelerate business investments in nature-based solutions like protecting forests and other carbon sinks to regenerating ecosystems and supporting biodiversity.

Increased environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting standards force companies to accurately collect, organize, and report their impacts to multiple standards. Investors want greater disclosure as they see not only regulation but trends in consumer and employee demand. They want more sustainable products, services, policies, and business performance; they want to work for responsible companies, and they are more engaged. and stabilize employment.

Economic sanctions are an important mechanism in the efforts to restore peace. We are in constant exchange with governments around the world, have every confidence in their guidance, and fully support the actions taken so far. We are stopping business in Russia and Belarus aligned with sanctions and, in addition, pausing all sales of 51·çÁ÷services and products in Russia and Belarus.

With hundreds of thousands of people fleeing their homes, finding and providing shelter quickly is crucial. We have allocated an initial €1 million in humanitarian support for the people of Ukraine and are working with national Red Cross organizations, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and other organizations to offer our technology to support their efforts.

For example, our software solutions can help organizations register refugees, coordinate volunteer efforts, and procure humanitarian goods. Additionally, we are working with Qualtrics to help non-profits and regional governments understand the most pressing needs of the people they serve and route them with accommodations and essential supplies on the ground. We have also offered to convert our office space at locations across Europe into warehousing and accommodation for refugees.

The safety and protection of our colleagues in the region is of the utmost importance. For those colleagues who chose to leave Ukraine, we are providing financial and logistical support to try to make this incredibly difficult step as easy as possible.

The 51·çÁ÷family stands with everyone affected and horrified by the events in Ukraine. There are no winners in war, and we join others in calling for the restoration of peace.

Updated March 9: We have suspended sales in Russia and Belarus. We stand with the people of Ukraine and condemn the war.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.

This weekend marks the start of the 26th (COP26), a global meeting of nearly 200 countries to negotiate ways to limit catastrophic effects of climate change. COP26 is significant in many ways: it is the first COP to review and strengthen the Paris Agreement commitments, it is the first since the pandemic began, and it is also the first since the U.S. rejoined the Paris Agreement.

What’s more, many experts see COP26 as our last chance to avoid an environmental catastrophe. If there was a moment of true emergency in the fight against climate change, it is now. 51·çÁ÷is actively participating in COP26 to support ambitious government and business action, and here are three things I hope to see prioritized during the conference:

1. Reduce and Measure Emissions

Every country needs to raise the bar on greenhouse gas reductions and regeneration. We need to set ambitious emission reduction targets for 2030 to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and ensure the goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C remains within reach. And we need to carefully track our progress. Since you cannot manage what you cannot measure, digital technologies will play a crucial role in this.

2. Protect Our Natural Habitats

The emphasizes the role of nature-based solutions to climate change, stating that we won’t achieve the 1.5° target without addressing biodiversity loss and land degradation. A fifth of the world’s 2,000 largest companies have committed to net-zero targets on emissions. Now it’s time for businesses to also make commitments to protect nature and in turn fight climate change and the biodiversity crisis.

3. Cooperate on a Global Scale

No country, government, business, scientific community, or society will be able to tackle climate change alone. We all need to work together to accelerate the transformation of our economies, deal with the impacts of the climate change we have already created, and bend the curve on global emissions.

At SAP, we lead as an, through our own sustainable business operations and practices, and as an enabler, helping our customers to manage their “green line” together with top and bottom lines. In doing so, we’re helping address some of the most profound environmental, economic, and social challenges of our time.

Supported by , organizations can go beyond “just” controlling their productivity and operating results to making climate protection measurable, diversity and inclusion visible, and ethical responsibility transparent. In this way, they can promote sustainable business practices not only in their own company, but across their entire value chain — from tracking their end-to-end carbon footprint to ensuring diversity, inclusion, and the protection of human rights.

Way too often, we think about sustainability in terms of the distant future, but each day that passes without taking adequate action is a day wasted. It is now or never for concrete global activities that can not only address the effects of climate change, but also have a lasting impact on its causes.

This weekend marks the start of a pivotal moment for us to work together to do so.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.

Oftentimes, when we talk about sustainability, we think about it in terms of the distant future. But looking at the past few years alone, it becomes clear that we don’t need solutions in, say, five years. We need them now.

It’s not about what we are doing to make the world better by the time our children are grown up, but about what can we do to make things better right now. What are we doing to make an impact by the time they learn to ride a bike, have their first day in kindergarten, leave school, and enter their first job?

We need to act now to ensure that our children have a sustainable future.

We might think that our individual actions don’t matter. But changes – both big and small –in the way we live our lives can help reduce our own personal carbon footprint, and also encourage other individuals, businesses, and policy makers to act for the good of the planet. Because at the end of the day, everything counts. Every day we act, every step we take, every decision we make can help move the needle. And vice versa: Every step we don’t take today will take us three steps back in the future.

Today is Earth Overshoot Day 2021. It marks the date when humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year. From this day forward, we are using an unsustainable amount of the world’s resources. The exact date each year is calculated based on 3 million statistical data points from 200 countries, and the team at Global Footprint Network  in more detail.

This year’s date is almost as early as in 2019, when it fell on July 26, after being momentarily pushed back in 2020 by lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic. So for more than 40 years, we have been using up our planet’s resources in excess. Our desire for every aspect of our lives to become better, faster, and newer is not only stealing from a planet that cannot keep up with the demands of almost 8 billion people, but also costing our future generations an Earth on which they can live and prosper.

COVID-19 Reset

The graphic above shows what is possible in extreme situations such as with the numerous lockdowns and restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Just a few examples: Due to beach closures in Florida, female turtles laid more eggs. In Japan — one of my favorite countries to visit — the Nara deer left the park to find food because the tourists that would normally feed them were no longer there. Air and water quality improved as tourism ground to a halt. For the first time in 30 years, Indians in the city of Jalandhar and the surrounding area could see the Himalayas.

These examples show that our planet could recover relatively quickly if given the chance. However, life in many parts of the world is returning to a new version of normal with more and more people receiving vaccinations. While this is good for humanity, it also has an impact on nature.

Our Responsibility

The private sector for sure has its part to play if we are to combat climate change. Businesses should not focus exclusively on profit maximization, but at turning things around, in the here and now, for current and future generations.

Without any doubt, sustainability is about more than protecting our environment. It is about ensuring the balance between economic growth, environmental care, and social welfare. That said, carbon neutrality is a major driver and key indicator of sustainability.

At SAP, we set our goal to become carbon-neutral in our own operations by the end of 2023, two years earlier than previously stated. The 51·çÁ÷approach is of first avoiding, second reducing, and third compensating for emissions. You can read more about our goal for 2023 here.

But in addition to pursuing our own targets, we also want to help our customers become more sustainable. Because we are convinced: It’s time to build sustainability into the fabric of how we do business. We need to make it a standard dimension of corporate management just like productivity or growth.

°Â±đ’v±đĚý to help businesses embed operational, experiential, and financial data and insights to drive sustainability at scale. With our sustainability portfolio, we support companies on their entire journey across the full spectrum of sustainability – from carbon neutrality to social impact and economic progress.

Additionally, we will drive multi-year innovation roadmaps to ultimately provide our customers with end-to-end visibility around sustainability, integrated into their core business processes. To get to our vision of , we must act now with the goal of zero waste, zero emissions, and zero inequality.

Given the significance of global supply chains in tackling sustainability, the 51·çÁ÷community truly has the power to protect our planet and create a future our children want to be part of. So, let’s give our planet the chance to recover and #MoveTheDate together.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.
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51·çÁ÷has embraced a location-agnostic work style for decades. By doing this, we have built a truly global workforce and supported employees with mobile technology to enable work to happen from anywhere, anytime.

Our recent employee surveys on work style post-COVID show that this continued work flexibility is desired. Over 80% of 51·çÁ÷employees say they want a mix of working from home or remote with some time in the office.

Today, 51·çÁ÷is building on our proven ways of remote work that our​ ​employees have enjoyed across the world for decades into a new global framework that is entirely flexible and trust based. We continue to believe in​ ​a workplace based on​ ​trust and empowerment​ ​because employees are​ ​at the heart of what we do.

Today, 51·çÁ÷pledges to provide a setup that fits every​ ​role, style, and location with:

• A 100% flexible and trust-based workplace as the norm, not the​ ​exception
• An inclusive environment in which people can work from home, at the office, or remotely, so everyone is​ ​empowered to run at their personal best, driving success for SAP’s customers
• Flexible work schedules, so employees can decide​ ​when they work aligned with business needs
• Inspiring office designs tailored for creativity, collaboration, community, ​and focused work, enabling​ ​employees to find the right space for every task
• Office buildings that prioritize ​sustainability and health
• An approach that meets local regulations across the many regions where our employees work

Our pledge to flex is designed to ensure employees have what they need to be productive, creative, and inspired while running the business responsibly and meeting business requirements. And, as we have seen in industry surveys, women and recent graduates particularly desire and benefit from a flexible work environment. With our pledge, we hope and believe 51·çÁ÷will be a preferred company for these groups of valuable employees.

A centerpiece of SAP’s flexible work approach is our technology. provides an end-to-end human experience management (HXM) solution from employees’ onboarding throughout their career development – improving engagement, growth, and retention wherever they work. Qualtrics enables us to stay connected with employee sentiment by providing instant visibility into the employee’s lived experience across the globe. To enable easy and smooth collaboration regardless of where people are located, we are working on integration of Microsoft Teams across our portfolio, allowing a broader choice of access tools.

At SAP, we are honored and humbled to be chosen multiple times as employer of choice in the countries where we are located. Our pledge to flex is another expression of our profound respect for our employees.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.

However, while the positive environmental side effects of the pandemic spurred hope for a “green shift” in our global economy post-pandemic, we are at a turning point when it comes to curbing climate change. The dip in greenhouse gas emissions last year accumulated “only” to a seven percent decline with signs of returning to pre-pandemic levels already. While encouraging, this will not bring us any closer to the long-term deep decarbonization pathway needed by 2030. A systems change is needed. We need to rethink our economy.

Companies are increasingly under the spotlight regarding their societal and environmental impact. Not only must capital market-oriented companies in many countries provide information about non-financial aspects of their business activities. Also, consumers today aren’t just making decisions based on products or price but are more willing to buy from and work for companies that are taking a stand on current and broadly relevant issues like climate, sustainability, transparency, and social justice such as fair employment practices.

Sustainability is no longer optional, but has become key to the long-term success of any business. It’s about defining new competitive advantages, lowering risks, building resilience to pricing regulations, gaining ground with investors, and being ahead of emerging consumer demands. As a result, we see sustainability becoming a central dimension of corporate decision making, just like cost or growth.

Across all industries, digital technologies can help reduce huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions and natural resource consumption. However, no single company can develop all the solutions and technologies that are needed. Businesses across all sectors are actively pursuing joint opportunities to progress with their decarbonization goals. The energy industry is no exception to this. It is increasingly working with customers, governments, and others to help address carbon emissions in different sectors, jointly developing innovative solutions to help accelerate energy transition.

The recent wave of 2030 to 2050 “net-zero” ambitions being announced from major oil and gas players does signal a willingness to address climate action in their core business model. But as demand for hydrocarbon-based energy flattens — and eventually declines — these companies need to look at all aspects of how they do business and redefine their long-term business models in a hydrocarbon-constrained world.

Based on my conversations with many customers from this industry, it becomes clear: they want to evolve faster. But how can they navigate a shifting strategic landscape, still dependent on the old business model, while providing returns to shareholders through an accelerating energy transition – and in this not only survive but thrive?

The fact is, no company can take this journey alone. Working together can help transform challenge to opportunity. We are here to work with  our customers to achieve new long-term sustainable business models, using intelligent technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and advanced data analytics to both optimize operations and reduce emissions.

It starts with the fundamental integration of sustainability data into business processes across all industries and across all value chains. By helping our customers and suppliers across industries to take the first steps to embed carbon emissions tracking and management into everything, everywhere, all the time – in operations, in supply chains, in products, even into employee activities – the foundation for 2030 ambitions will be set. They can make faster and responsible business decisions while taking sustainability into account. They can reduce and mitigate emissions. They can simulate options for sustainable investment, operational decisions, and managing natural and social resources, just like any other enterprise resource.

It is in this spirit that we are looking forward to collaborating with Shell, which has embarked on an industry-leading journey to transform its business. Shell’s carbon management approach focuses on avoiding, reducing, and then offsetting the unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions using technology and nature. We will partner to support the energy transition, explore carbon avoidance, reduction, and offsetting models, footprint tracking, and accelerate data transparency with further industry partners for a more sustainable business.

No doubt: Advancing toward a net-zero emissions future is one of the biggest challenges – if not the biggest – facing humanity today, and the clock is ticking. No company or country will be able to solve this alone. Industries, governments, and customers must work together to find ways to tackle carbon emissions. Digital technologies will be a catalyst to speed up and democratize innovation if used in partnership and responsibly.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.
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Fortunately, at SAP, remote operations across all functions have been a reality for many years, and our automated processes and technologies allowed us to move all of 51·çÁ÷as close to a virtual organization as it can get. But keeping the business running with the help of resilient processes is only one part of the equation; it’s just as important to support our employees’ personal resilience.

We all know that work probably will never be the same, yet I still haven’t gotten used to a lot of things in this “new normal.” I miss meeting my whole family, being around friends and colleagues, eating out, or exchanging ideas face-to-face. And while the intensity of how this affects our daily lives may vary, it is safe to say that mental health issues are a threat to all of us.

Turning desks and kitchen tables into workplaces not just challenged our business continuity, but also impacted people’s private spaces. Suddenly, there was no clear separation of work and home anymore. Many found themselves teleworking full time for the first time, isolated from co-workers, friends, and family. Daily living routines are disrupted, and many are juggling several added pressures but may not feel they have the time, space, or energy to devote to self-care.

The numbers are revealing: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that in the first half of 2019, 11% of U.S. adults surveyed reported symptoms of anxiety or depression. Throughout the crisis, that number had almost quadrupled to 42% in December 2020.

Well-being and mental health have always been , but the current times further emphasize the need to make physical and emotional wellness a top priority. We have learned a lot, but I would like to emphasize three aspects in particular:

First, Prevent

A healthy workplace culture is the basis for a successful business. It’s critical to create a work environment that is genuinely supportive of mental health. The pandemic has not only forced mental health problems, but also made them more visible. The challenge is to identify issues before they even occur and detect potential symptoms early.

Second, Listen

To do so, it’s essential to proactively foster dialogue and awareness around the topic, fight any form of stigmatization, and allow opportunities to reflect, pause, and recharge. At SAP, we regularly assess and report our that captures the degree to which our workplace culture supports people’s well-being, work-life balance, and organizational health.

Third, Act

Create initiatives and programs and provide resources as well as a strong network of support. At SAP, we are driving a mental health initiative, including the 51·çÁ÷Global Mindfulness Practice program as well as a strong community of health ambassadors around the globe. Until today, more than 11,400 colleagues are trained in mindfulness courses. Our health ambassadors engage with more than 35 locations worldwide, share local practices, and work toward a consistent standard in all 51·çÁ÷locations.

If the pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that nothing is more important than our health — both physically and mentally. Protecting our highest good by practicing mindfulness and being mindful with others is key. Just because we cannot be physically close shouldn’t mean we can’t be there for each other.

Healthy people are more resilient and are therefore fundamental for a resilient business. What it takes as a company to embrace resiliency beyond people is covered by my colleague Thomas Saueressig in The Co-Existence of Challenge and Opportunity for Businesses.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.
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The global pursuit of net-zero carbon emissions is a huge undertaking. A significant transition to renewable energy alone can only address . The other 45% result from transportation, land use, building management, and the production of consumer and industrial goods. This shows that taking climate action requires many different, interlinking solutions and needs to be a joint endeavor among nations, civil societies, and business alike.

The shift toward sustainable business practices is being driven by governments, consumers, investors, and even employees. While most companies monitor and measure the CO2 emissions of their production sites, customers are increasingly demanding visibility into the full carbon footprint of the individual products they purchase.

As one result, companies need to move from the linear economic model that still dominates the industry today to the principle of circularity – a systemic shift that builds long-term resilience, generates business and economic opportunities, and provides environmental and societal benefits.

In this new equation, carbon is increasingly becoming a new vehicle of transformation. It is effectively a global, universal “currency” that can be tracked, traded, managed, and minimized like any other resource. Still, for most businesses, managing carbon is either seen as a necessary cost of doing business, or a tax that serves as a penalty. One way or the other, it is considered to be corrosive to profits.

But what if we could convert carbon management into an investment strategy that can also drive profit? What if we could make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable, without sacrificing one for the other?

This is just as visionary as it is promising. Let’s take the example of a large fast-moving consumer goods company. On a five- to 10-year horizon, depending on legislative developments, for avoided offsetting spend of one to two percent of revenue per year, top-line growth of one to three percent of revenue per year, and cost savings of €2 to 5 million per year based on more accurate and efficient emissions accounting and reporting.

This needs software that helps companies measure, account, and take the right action – and 51·çÁ÷is uniquely positioned to help enterprises tackle this challenge. As we run the supply chains of the largest companies in the world, we can play a central role in helping companies manage their green line by minimizing the carbon footprint and negative environmental impact of their products.

Watch this space for more information on the  and further details on how we help companies to responsibly manage their green line.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.
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Particularly with many still working from home, I cannot imagine what daily communication and collaboration would look like without Microsoft Teams – and I think this holds true for much of the business community in a lot of enterprises.

So it came as no surprise that when we announced our new RISE with SAP offering, a highlight for many was Satya Nadella joining me to share his thoughts on how Microsoft and 51·çÁ÷team up to lift collaboration to the next level. One aspect many of you were particularly interested in is how we will integrate 51·çÁ÷solutions with Microsoft Teams, so let’s have a look at some examples.

Putting Collaboration into Business Context

For many companies around the world, remote selling has become a necessity for conducting business. To simplify remote sales processes and allow sales professionals to fully focus on their customer engagements, we will integrate 51·çÁ÷Sales Cloud with Microsoft Teams. Users can easily set up meetings from the 51·çÁ÷system without switching applications. During a customer call, all information will be accessible in Microsoft Teams via an embedded 51·çÁ÷Sales Cloud application. Finally, all information, including meeting recording and notes, will get automatically synced back to 51·çÁ÷Sales Cloud in real time. Check out this to get an idea of what this scenario will look like:

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All of us know how much easier business life is when you have everything you need at your fingertips. Thanks to integrating Microsoft Teams with 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA through 51·çÁ÷Conversational AI, end users can seamlessly get all business-relevant information and critical business insights instantly. Chatbots help them identify and reach out to business contacts directly. In a first instance, we will focus on one concrete business persona: the operational purchaser. Over time, we will develop chatbots for more use cases and make the content available to our customers through templates so they can adopt custom-specific adjustments that meet their conversational AI needs.

Many customers use 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud in addition to Microsoft Teams for generating data-driven insights into their business. By bringing together 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud and Microsoft Teams, we enable users to benefit from both augmented and smart capabilities of 51·çÁ÷Analytics Cloud and Microsoft Teams’ strong collaboration capabilities. Combining the power, we will provide an integrated solution for reporting and planning access with direct utilization of enhanced collaboration functionalities from the daily business workflow.

Time to Explore

To simplify users’ collaboration processes and enhance workplace productivity, we are exploring many more integration scenarios. A lot of 51·çÁ÷solutions could form a robust symbiosis with Microsoft Teams, and we will cover a wide range of use cases across lines of business – from procurement to recruiting, talent management, and learning to travel and expense management.

Take 51·çÁ÷Business Network as an example: While it helps drive process efficiency through predefined messages, documents, and rules that can be shared and processed systematically, Microsoft Teams complements 51·çÁ÷solutions through collaboration capabilities like online meetings, chats, and more. Together, the solutions would enable users to run business processes efficiently while being resilient to disruptions.

Or imagine you are a recruiter working with our human experience management (HXM) solutions, wanting to finalize a contract with a prospective hire. By integrating Microsoft Teams, you could extract the contract from your 51·çÁ÷system, edit it in Microsoft Teams, trigger a call to confirm the changes with the prospect, and store the contract back in your 51·çÁ÷system without changing applications.

As you can see, the opportunities are endless! The first integration scenarios are planned to go live throughout this year, with the integrations for 51·çÁ÷Sales Cloud and 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA to come in the second quarter, and others to follow suit. These will mainly focus on classic use cases, such as setting up Microsoft Teams meetings directly via the 51·çÁ÷applications. Next are then even bolder steps as we plan to enable context-based collaboration through 51·çÁ÷systems and Microsoft Teams. This will allow users to access all relevant information about their interaction in Microsoft Teams through their 51·çÁ÷systems or vice versa, anywhere and anytime.

Ultimately, with this, we will step up the employee experience and enable smooth and frictionless interactions across all levels of enterprises and their environment.

Want to learn more? Check out “Microsoft and SAP: Expanding Our Partnership,” from Thomas Saueressig.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.
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While everyone understands the why and the opportunities of digital transformation, the hardest part seems to be how to holistically transform. Indeed, many companies think that digital transformation will happen just by performing a technical migration to the cloud or by buying new technology. The need for changing how an enterprise runs with the help of new business models and more intelligent processes is often ignored.

So we asked ourselves: what can we do to support our customers on this journey even better? How can we help them change the culture and mindset of their enterprises, redesign their business processes, and reduce internal complexity, ultimately enabling them to adopt new business models and stay ahead of their competition?

Let’s be honest: Infrastructure as a Service or Software as a Service alone won’t cut it. To truly transform, companies need a holistic offering. What they really need is Business Transformation as a Service.

Our answer to this is RISE with SAP. Together with our ecosystem, we are bundling everything companies need to holistically transform their business with a fast time to value — at their own speed and terms, regardless of their starting point. It simplifies our customers’ journey in three simple steps.

Step 1: Business Process Redesign

Making use of best practices and building on SAP’s unique data treasures, our Business Process Intelligence solution allows customers to continuously analyze how processes perform, benchmark them against industry standards, and provide tailored recommendations on how to adopt new business models, automate, and standardize processes. Thanks to a direct connection to SAP’s workflow, robotic process automation (RPA), and other artificial intelligence (AI) services, intelligence can be seamlessly embedded in business processes.

Step 2: Technical Migration

Embedded in RISE with 51·çÁ÷are technical services to smooth the migration to a standard, modular, and flexible solution landscape with a consistent data layer – key to reacting quickly to new business demands. This includes essential services by 51·çÁ÷and partners to get rid of modifications and custom code and to support them in harmonizing and governing their data layer so they can run and steer their company based on one source of truth.

Step 3: Build Your Intelligent Enterprise

The basis is the cloud infrastructure. Customers will gain a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to their existing landscapes, by running the workloads in an 51·çÁ÷data center or via the hyperscalers, always with the best operations costs in the industry. And no matter which infrastructure they chose or who the operations partner is, 51·çÁ÷will be their single point of contact.

Also part of RISE with 51·çÁ÷is 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform, the foundation of the Intelligent Enterprise. Customers and partners can quickly develop innovations to easily complement 51·çÁ÷solutions – thanks to one semantical data model, one AI and analytics layer, one identity and authorization concept, and the same application business services, such as one workflow management. Additional low-code/no-code capabilities make it even easier to expand our solutions. And our platform enables out-of-the-box integration: 51·çÁ÷to SAP, but also 51·çÁ÷to non-SAP.

Access to 51·çÁ÷Business Network is also included. Times when companies are managing their business within four walls with one-to-one connections to the stakeholders across the supply chain are over. From now on, it is all about managing the complete supply chain in real time — to react faster than anyone else to changing market conditions.

And finally, as you need intelligent applications to truly change how your business runs, we will include our market-leading intelligent ERP, 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud. Customers not only can pick their deployment of choice depending on their level of standardization, but also benefit from embedded AI, RPA, and advanced analytics. And as we all have realized how important it is to run a frictionless enterprise, we will integrate Microsoft Teams across our solution portfolio to bring collaboration to the next level.

In short: RISE with 51·çÁ÷provides our customers with the basic components of an intelligent enterprise in one bundle, complemented with premium services and tools. One offer. One contract for SAP-related services. One responsible party for service-level agreements, operations, and issue handling. It’s as simple as that.

Building on this kickstart, companies can tailor their intelligent enterprise to meet their respective business needs. Customers and partners alike can easily complement, extend, and integrate with any other of our line-of-business and industry solutions, partner, or third-party solution, using exactly the same data model and business services as our own 51·çÁ÷apps. This allows them to run their core and industry-specific processes – seamlessly, end-to-end, and top-to-bottom, with full 360° transparency.

For more information, make sure to check out blogs by my colleagues Juergen Mueller, Thomas Saueressig, and Uwe Grigoleit, as well as an interview with Jan Gilg, and see what our partners have to say.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.

Vaccines require certain storage conditions to maintain their effectiveness. To ensure they remain effective despite , logistics service providers need robust processes, trained personnel, proper facilities and equipment, and a robust delivery network to cope with the staggering volume of shipments.

And this is where we at 51·çÁ÷are ready to support.

Moderna is a clinical stage biotechnology company that pioneers messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines to create a new generation of transformative medicines for patients. One of them is mRNA-1273, a vaccine candidate against COVID-19. Moderna is running 51·çÁ÷Digital Supply Chain solutions to help with the serialization and distribution of a potential COVID-19 vaccine.

is helping Moderna to comply with international legislation intended to prevent counterfeit medicines to reach patients. The application provides a corporate serialization repository, serial number management, and regulatory reporting capabilities. To enable collaboration with its supply chain partners, namely contract manufacturers and wholesalers, Moderna leverages 51·çÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences, a public cloud network that enables collaboration for pharmaceutical supply chain trading partners.

It uses a digital network built on 51·çÁ÷Cloud Platform and enables trading partners to exchange large amounts of serialization and associated traceability data. To comply with U.S. legislation that includes the verification of pharmaceutical product packs in case of returns or apparently suspect products, the network includes a blockchain-based verification repository to help eliminate counterfeit products along the pharmaceutical supply chain.

Manufacturers push data into blockchain using Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) messages, a global standard for creating and sharing visibility event data, both within and across enterprises. Wholesale distributors then can execute verification requests against the blockchain-based repository. By now, 51·çÁ÷Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences already processes over 70% of the overall drug U.S.-volume for verification.

Because these solutions are integrated into Moderna’s backbone consisting of 51·çÁ÷ERP and supply chain management software, the company has a holistic view over its end-to-end processes.

But we are not stopping here. To support our customers in withstanding the high market dynamics and always staying one step ahead of change, we continue to co-innovate with our customers in all industries. This way, we ensure that we deliver the right solutions at the right time.

No doubt, these are unprecedented times. Never before have scientists and pharmaceutical companies focused so intently on the development of a vaccine both with manpower and money. Never before was the urge to deliver more pressing. And never before was our chance to truly help the world run better and improve people’s lives greater.

In these times, intelligent enterprises can make a difference. The development of a new vaccine within just one year is an unbelievable accomplishment, and we at 51·çÁ÷are ready to help deliver it to all parts of the world.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.
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At the same time, the positive environmental side effects of the pandemic have shown us what is possible and how quickly we can drive change. Grounded flights, emptied highways, and shuttered factories caused global carbon-dioxide emissions to fall to levels not seen since 2006 as stay-at-home orders peaked in April 2020. Seven global cities — among them Delhi, Sao Paulo, and New York — experienced a  during the lockdown, . COVID-19 has led to a drop of 200 million tons of CO2 in China since the start of the outbreak. That equates to more than 10% of total worldwide emissions.

This by no means mitigates, nor makes any less devastating, the human cost of the outbreak; death, quarantine measures, many businesses and households at financial breaking point are but a few of the consequences. But what this has served to highlight is that when it comes to solving the climate crisis, we can create massive change in a very short period of time.

We are at a turning point. Forecasts by the World Meteorological Organization suggest there is a 20% chance that global temperatures will be 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) higher than in the pre-industrial average in at least one year between 2020 and 2024. The 1.5°C mark is the level at which countries agreed to cap global warming at the 2015 Paris Agreement. While a new annual high might be followed by several years with lower average temperatures, breaking that threshold would be further evidence that international effects to curb climate change are not working.

Just as we cannot ignore the pandemic and its impact, we cannot continue to ignore climate change and the contribution of our enterprises. Eighty-five percent of the largest carbon emission-intensive companies use 51·çÁ÷to manage their processes, representing a huge opportunity. Digital technologies can help save huge amounts of carbon emissions in major industries like utilities, agriculture, and transport alone. These savings could potentially equal 500 billion trees. Just imagine the impact if all industries joined the effort.

Sustainability combines the vision of the Intelligent Enterprise and SAP’s purpose to help the world run better and improve people’s lives in the most natural way. It also presents a unique opportunity for us to create a lasting, positive impact for future generations. In 2009, 51·çÁ÷set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions back to the levels of 2000 by the year 2020. We achieved that goal more than two years early, despite increasing our employee base fourfold. We are committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2025, and we have reduced our net carbon footprint for the past five years, despite strong growth. Just recently, we were again named software industry leader in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for the 14th consecutive year.

But we are not only pursuing our own climate goals. We want to help our customers reinvent how to achieve their sustainability targets. In the transition to new sustainable business models, 51·çÁ÷has a team of innovation services and solutions professionals focused on enabling customers to embrace disruption and transform their business through innovation using intelligent technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and advanced data analytics.  We are helping companies track carbon emissions from their upstream supply chains to downstream logistics, including procurement, operations, and manufacturing.

Now, we are taking this even further by expanding our solutions to allow customers to measure and reduce carbon emissions along their value chain. We will embed sustainability as a new dimension of success into analytical and transactional applications. Or, as my colleague Thomas Saueressig rightly put it: we add a  for measuring a company’s performance.

Beginning earlier this year, we are running trials with customers from industries like automotive, chemicals, food, and engineering. 51·çÁ÷Product Carbon Footprint Analytics is the first solution available to the market, and our customer Doehler is the first to adopt it. There is more to come, so watch this space for more information!

We want to help our customers to reinvent how they tackle sustainability. We are creating value for them by helping them reach their carbon objectives, and we are helping them make responsible business decisions while taking sustainability into account. They will be able to simulate options for sustainable investment, operational decisions, and managing natural and social resources, just like any other enterprise resource.

With this, 51·çÁ÷takes another important step in turning our customers into sustainable intelligent enterprises – ultimately proving that the Intelligent Enterprise can make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.
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In most business processes today, there are many dependencies. Companies are using and, in many cases, depending on their network of partners to meet growing customer demands for innovative and sustainable products, delivered when, where, and how they want them. A disruption in only one of the steps can put the whole process at risk.

No doubt, COVID-19 has highlighted supply chain sensitivities and the need for responsive, resilient, interconnected, and circular supply chains. But the outbreak isn’t an isolated event. Disruptions are increasing in frequency and magnitude, including geopolitical events, climate-related disasters, and public health crises.

Traditionally, companies served their customers with a siloed value chain and manage relations in a sequential manner and point to point — many still do. For decades, low-cost supply and minimal inventory were the key tenets of supply chain management. But in an increasingly turbulent world, supply networks that are overly dependent on the lowest-cost supplier and minimal inventory levels without safeguarding human rights and labor standards can rapidly imperil the business.

Transparency, Choice, Agility

Complex business networks already exist as companies rely heavily on their extended ecosystem to operate effectively. They need to understand their multi-tiered supply network. They need to collaborate with manufacturing partners, asset service providers, and third-party logistics providers. They also need to serve their customers through distributors, resellers, wholesalers, or retailers in a demand network.

But often they are hindered by linear, siloed systems with point-to-point integrations that limit the flow of information and processes. To adjust quickly and responsibly to disruption and fast-changing market demands and manage dependencies in real time, companies need to reinvent how they do business with the help of interconnected value chains and flexible networks.

A unified business network is greater than the sum of the individual businesses. It incorporates customers, suppliers, distributors, and other stakeholders — cross company and across company borders. By sharing data and information in the network, enterprises get real-time 360-degree visibility to sense demand, anticipate risks, and manage retail, distribution, and procurement through to the consumer.

We will replace disconnected, one-to-one integrations with trading partners, bringing points of integration together in one place. 51·çÁ÷Business Network connects our existing procurement, logistics, asset, and industry-specific networks today, and will connect to more networks in the future.

Because when all your networks become one single network, collaboration becomes singular and synchronous – and a common data model, set of services, intelligence, and an analytics engine make it possible. Now you and every trading partner connect to the network once, in turn connecting you to multiple partners and people. Your systems connect once and processes and data flow freely and securely across functions and workflows.

With this level of consistency and precision, 51·çÁ÷Business Network smooths out the friction that slows down commerce. It applies cross-company, network-wide intelligence to predict opportunities and avoid disruptions. It delivers deeper insights to benchmark your performance, so you know where you can improve. We will share more information soon, so stay tuned!

Moving from enterprise to network planning results in enhanced transparency, visibility, collaboration, agility, and optimization, and allows for better steering across the whole value chain in real time. We will create value for our customers by giving them visibility and insights into their supply network, offering flexibility in adjusting it rapidly, and a way to collaborate along end-to-end processes that span way beyond company borders.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.
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Success today is not just about improving your products and reacting to market demands. To stay relevant, you need to be able to constantly adapt to changing market requirements. You must constantly question and reinvent yourself, your business models, your processes, the way you work.

COVID-19 has brought into sharp relief how vulnerable companies really are, catapulting digital transformation to the top of the priority list for virtually every organization in the world. In the blink of an eye, the pandemic has significantly disrupted working practices, making it imperative for businesses to adapt and act fast — pivoting operations and processes to for a sustainable future ahead.

As a result, digital transformation is no longer an option, but a must. COVID-19 reminds us painfully of how volatile our world is and how fragile our interconnected, globalized economies are. At the same time, we have never used so many natural resources, emitted so many greenhouse gases and produced so much waste. To prosper over time, every company today must not only deliver in terms of financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. We all need to care about a sustainable world as much as we care about business success.

Since 1972, we have with our customers and led every evolutionary stage of their business — as trusted partners, paradigm shifters, and drivers of their business transformation. For us, it has always been about helping our customers serve rising demands with technology — enabling them to anticipate, adapt, and even be ahead of change. This knowledge and experience fuel our intelligent enterprise strategy, all with one goal: supporting our customers in becoming resilient, profitable, and sustainable growth companies — without sacrificing one for the other.

For nearly 50 years, our products have revolutionized the way business is done. It began with a standard software to automate financial accounting that processes data in real time, allowing users to do all tasks in one integrated system. 51·çÁ÷R/2 expanded real-time processing of purely financial applications to other business areas, integrating end-to-end with all of a company’s business functions, such as accounting, manufacturing, supply chain, and human resources (HR). With 51·çÁ÷R/3, we smoothed the path to a globalized economy, helping customers of every industry and size to customize and extend enterprise resource planning (ERP) to their needs. And with the introduction of 51·çÁ÷HANA, 51·çÁ÷allowed customers to analyze data in seconds instead of days or even weeks, thus enabling them to run the same processes in a completely new way.

Now and together with our customers and partners, we will again reinvent how businesses run. We will expand our strong core, consisting of our intelligent suite, our Experience Management solutions, and our Business Technology Platform. We will offer industry cloud solutions so that companies can run their business seamlessly. We will build the world’s largest business network, allowing businesses to quickly react to fast changing environments and connecting demand to supply across company boundaries. And we will introduce solutions for sustainability management for organizations to understand and minimize their carbon footprint.

Over the coming of weeks, I will provide thorough information on several topics, so stay tuned! Together with my more than 100,000 colleagues worldwide, I am looking forward to building on SAP’s amazing heritage, delivering the right technology and software to help our customers to reinvent how businesses run and achieve their vision. Because this has never been more important than today.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.
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Digital transformation has upended businesses on a global scale and is creating an opportunity for reinvention across all industries. Technology and innovation have become the key determinants in how successful businesses are run. And the Fourth Industrial Revolution significantly changes the customer and employee experience, helping enterprises to grow and scale their business.

For more than 30 years, together with our customers, 51·çÁ÷has been developing industry-specific software and modifications on premise, tailored to their unique needs. But in today’s volatile environment, where industry boundaries are blurring, agility and speed have become a new competitive advantage. Companies need to be able to quickly adapt to fast-changing conditions, be it with new business models or by flexibly adjusting existing business processes.

To help them introduce new business models and run their value chains end to end, our customers want 51·çÁ÷software and technology to drive more vertical, industry-specific processes in the cloud with seamless integration into the backbone, which in many cases are core 51·çÁ÷applications.

We heard this feedback, and we are acting on it. Building on our deep industry expertise, we are developing modular industry applications on our Business Technology Platform. To help ensure a fast time-to-value and solid integration, they are based on the same data model as our core applications. These industry apps help our customers stay competitive in their industry by adapting their processes to new business models and enabling automation. To achieve this, we are co-innovating on our platform with our partners and customers — the biggest brands in the world, across all industries.

As an example, Honeywell and SAP teamed up to change the game in real estate by improving building performance. And just this week, we announced taking this even further, to an industry that like hardly any other represents how business models are changing, how enterprises need to work differently, and how much sustainability matters: the automotive industry.

The automotive industry is racing into a new world of mobility even as it continues with the traditional business model of designing, manufacturing, selling, servicing, and financing cars. Megatrends — including connectivity, autonomous driving, shared mobility, and electrification — are shaping the industry and the world of mobility in real time.

We see rigid automotive assembly lines turning into flexible, highly automated modular manufacturing. Logistics is moving from point-to-point communication to network-based original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and supplier collaboration, and business models are changing from classical direct vehicle sales to subscription-based or pay-per-use models.

This transformation to a new world of mobility requires an unparalleled commitment to digitalization and a networked economy. Automotive companies will need to become intelligent enterprises, where passengers and drivers are the focal points for integrated process design around mobility and the in-car experience.

Succeeding in a digital and networked economy also requires a new approach to production. Automotive companies will need to be flexible and shift focus from hardware to software innovation. In addition, a unified business network that connects the entire value chain across enterprises will be the critical success factor.

The partnership between Bosch and 51·çÁ÷that we announced emphasizes our strong commitment to the automotive industry transformation. Together, we will develop a digital industry standard for the exchange and use of company data along the value chain, thus building the network for the automotive industry of the future.

From incoming orders to production and delivery to invoicing, we will build on Bosch’s industry expertise and leadership to translate business processes into 51·çÁ÷systems. By merging and automating these processes, we want to jointly define new digital standards and facilitate real-time data exchange with suppliers and customers to ultimately make the entire process more efficient.

For example, real-time data exchange in a network around the digital twin will enable efficient quality assurance. Data harmonization and secure data exchange along the automotive value chain helps ensure that every stakeholder has end-to-end, real-time access to all relevant data.

Let’s assume that a new norm on distance control is introduced. For safety, this needs to be reflected in all driver-assistance systems. Based on a networked approach and the digital twin, both the system and the automobile manufacturer simultaneously get insights into how many and which vehicles and systems are affected and can easily collaborate on quality analysis and simulation. Required software updates can then easily be deployed “over the air” across the supply chain as an efficient reaction to safety risks.

Based on this increased efficiency and the strong networks of Bosch and SAP, our cooperation’s benefits will span across the entire industry by connecting the automotive value chain to establish a true digital thread for the industry. Together, we will develop a blueprint for other companies as well, and will thereby be able to help our customers drive continuous innovation by adopting best and next industry practices and to ultimately grow and transform their businesses to lead in their industries.

As we are convinced that we can only succeed together, we invite the whole industry to actively participate in this exciting journey!

Christian Klein is CEO and member of the Executive Board of 51·çÁ÷SE.
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Digital transformation was a line item on many business agendas long before COVID-19, but the pandemic catapulted it to the top of the priority list for virtually every organization in the world. In the blink of an eye, COVID-19 has significantly disrupted working practices, making it imperative for businesses to react quickly to changing market demands and make informed decisions based on real-time data.

Regardless of the size or industry of an enterprise, in the digital age you need to run your enterprise seamlessly across the value chain. But many of our customers have expanded their IT landscapes over the last few decades by buying point solutions to solve specific business needs. This has resulted in fragmented stacks, poorly integrated software, disconnected duplicate master data, and an inconsistent user experience (UX) — all of which both frustrate users and slow down innovation.

To turn data into meaningful insight, enterprises need to integrate all of their functions and processes based on a harmonized data model, get the complete picture in real time, and make decisions with knowledge of all interdependencies within the organization. Otherwise, you cannot make use of the billions of data to offer personalized experiences for your customers or manage demand and supply seamlessly in real time.

In February this year, I introduced , which provides a comprehensive overview of our integration plan in the cloud. It focuses on the significant value customers get from holistic technology and business process integration, SAP-to-SAP, but also to any third-party application in hybrid customer landscapes.

Since then, all teams have been working relentlessly so that we continue to execute on our road map. Out-of-the box integration for our software-as-a-service applications remains key for us. Gartner has just ranked us a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development Platforms, and we’re making excellent progress to deliver a seamless business process integration, including key elements like harmonization of SAP’s data domain model, user experience, workflow management, and real-time steering. Currently at 50 percent, we expect to deliver up to 90 percent of these cloud integration suite qualities to our customers by end of this year.

Today, I am happy to announce an update to .

• It includes updated timelines for our key processes for the intelligent enterprise — recruit to retire, lead to cash, design to operate, and source to pay — along our suite qualities. This provides our customers with a clear road map for their transitions into intelligent enterprises.
• We enhanced , our open and modular iPaaS supporting a comprehensive set of enterprise-wide integration scenarios, with further integration templates. Adding to already more than 1,500 prepackaged integrations and  over 160 open connectors for 51·çÁ÷to non-51·çÁ÷applications, these templates for example include or .
• Our integration suite offering is completed by , which helps customers to define and execute an integration strategy for cloud and hybrid landscapes by providing proven integration patterns and architecture blueprints that we have in close collaboration with our customers.
• To guide our customers on their journey to become intelligent enterprises, we also offer integration services — from strategy and planning through implementing to operating and optimizing such an intelligent enterprise.

These are just a few of the highlights. Check out “Progress Report and Updates to SAP’s Integration Road Map in the Cloud” by my Executive Board colleague Juergen Mueller for all the details.

I couldn’t be prouder of what the teams have achieved already, and I am convinced that our integrated intelligent suite is a true game changer — now and in the future.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.

Together we will persevere.

Moments of extraordinary challenge test our collective will, but also bring out the best of our collective humanity. With the unpredictable and fluid situation around COVID-19, the world is navigating through an uncertain period with few precedents.

At SAP, we have colleagues and customers in every corner of the world. Our thoughts are with all those affected and the many communities that continue to face extreme measures as we work to slow down and contain the spread of the virus. We also want to express our deepest thanks and appreciation to all the healthcare workers, first responders, police officers, emergency workers, and all others in essential functions and on the front lines caring for the sick and keeping us safe.

Naturally, the health, safety, and livelihood of the extended 51·çÁ÷family and the communities in which we serve is top of mind for us. Our focus first and foremost has been and will continue to be our workforce and colleagues. We’ve restricted travel, reimagined in-person events as digital experiences, and our 100,000 colleagues are almost entirely working remotely. Our customers are also a part of the 51·çÁ÷family, and we’re focused on standing by them as they navigate an incredibly challenging period.

Since our founding nearly 50 years ago, 51·çÁ÷has been synonymous with mission-critical business operations. We firmly believe that securing our business allows us to better secure those of our customers. In recent years, 51·çÁ÷has invested a great deal in crisis preparedness: 51·çÁ÷business, support, and cloud delivery teams have developed and documented business continuity plans to respond to disruptive incidents such as COVID-19, while ensuring reliability of our cloud solutions and the delivery of services to you. You can read more about some of the specific actions we are taking to ensure business continuity for 51·çÁ÷and for our customers here.

As we have seen, every day brings more information, but at times, more uncertainty. The more change we confront, the more important it is to understand how our people are feeling and adjusting to what may seem like a new normal on a daily basis. While we are all adapting to different work and collaboration models, the newness and the experiences are all unique to each of us depending on our job or industry. Understanding, acknowledging, and acting on the challenges and questions our employees have will help us equip them to navigate this new normal. All of us want employees who feel safe and productive, but it starts with understanding how they feel and what they need. To that end, Qualtrics has helped us get to the heart of every employee and we have opened up the same for any who need it. We hope this is helpful.

As a company we have always believed in our responsibility to support the next generation of professionals and users with our best-in-class digital learning. Now students and subject-matter experts need safe and healthy learning environments to continue their education virtually. Therefore, we are broadening access to some of our offerings to facilitate the continuity of innovation and enablement. This includes free access to select learning journeys for students at one of the 3,800 member universities of the 51·çÁ÷University Alliances program, online courses allowing young learners to explore technology, as well as the massive open online courses (MOOCs) available on the open51·çÁ÷platform. All offerings are free – please find more information here.

We also recognize the massive disruptions impacting global supply chains, and we’ve opened up access to so any buyer can post their immediate sourcing needs and any supplier can respond to show they can deliver. Our TripIt from Concur and 51·çÁ÷Litmos teams have offered up free services to help with and . Check back here for updates as our teams continue to come up with new ways to help.

For all of us at SAP, our vision to help the world run better and improve people’s lives has never been more important than in this current moment. We remain focused on our people, our customers, and our communities. Together, we will persevere.

All our best,

Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein

Business leaders solve multiple challenges every day. But are we prepared to solve the following? There are 7.7 billion people on the planet today. Already tomorrow, it will be 190,000 more.

Christian Klein is co-CEO of 51·çÁ÷SE.
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