When SAP Careers Hit the Mud

[This is a blog I wrote for an SAP careers firm.]

Here’s a getaway idea for those of you who enjoy driving off road, or would like to give it a spin. SAP customer Jaguar Land Rover offers an Experience Drives platform where, at 50 centers around the world, customers can test drive a Land Rover over inclines, descents, and side slopes; through water obstacles, and across muddy terrain – all with an expert coach who’ll keep you from getting in too deep.


This Experience Drives platform is enabled by a network of websites powered by SAP HANA and the SAP Cloud Platform. Consumers can choose the center nearest them, evaluate the various offerings, book them, and pay for them.


Under the hood, the SAP Cloud Platform and SAP HANA’s high-speed data crunching analyze bookings data and deliver insights into customer behaviors, such as when they choose to transact during their visits or when they get distracted and exit the site. Jaguar Land Rover gains deeper insights into transactions and customer behavior, and consumers get to drive Land Rovers through the mud. Everybody wins. (If you decide to check this out for yourself, have your credit card handy. U.S. adventures, for example, cost from $275 for one hour up to $2,400 for a two-day course.)

But while fun, this is a tiny sliver of the opportunity for SAP professionals. The consulting firm McKinsey tells us that, in Europe, the automotive industry accounts for 12 million jobs; in the US, more than 8 million; in Japan, more than 5 million. And it drives $953 billion per year into the U.S. economy.

This is almost unthinkably vast. For example, here’s a simplified glimpse of the supply chain for autonomous vehicles alone. It’s a lot of logos.

SAP is all over this space, with automotive industry solutions that are bucketed this way:

·    Sustainable Product Innovation

·    Manufacturing and Logistics

·    Responsive Supply Networks

·    Marketing, Sales, and Aftermarket

·    Digital Services

Mixed into those buckets are a lot of traditional SAP solutions, like manufacturing resource planning and supply chain. But all of them involve enormous cloud opportunities, as we’ve seen with our Jaguar Land Rover example.

What’s moving to the cloud? Look at what’s happening to the vehicles themselves. Here’s a graphically presented connected vehicle study polled an impressive 14,195 drivers in a dozen countries about their current and expected future connected use. They found:

·    Drivers are twice as likely to choose a car based on in-vehicle technology options rather than performance

·    65% would like to use an in-car feature to read and dictate emails while driving

·    Fortunately, 85% want a system that stops the car automatically

And every bit of that data is going to float right into the cloud. Yes, connected vehicles are powering an enormous part of the industry’s cloud transition, as we can see from Business Insider. “The connected-car market is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 45% — 10 times as fast as the overall car market. We expect that 75% of the estimated 92 million cars shipped globally in 2020 will be built with internet-connection hardware.”

The SAP Cloud Platform and the high-speed SAP HANA in-memory database can readily crunch the data generated by such a massive industry. And that spells great opportunities for SAP careers.

If you’re currently working in this industry – you’ve got lots of room for growth. Make sure you’re caught up on SAP Cloud credentials, with four new SAP Cloud certification exams just released.