In coup for German software giant SAP, the company today announced a tripartite collaboration with consultancies Accenture, Capgemini and Deloitte that seeks to drive greater uptake of the company’s latest enterprise resource planning (ERP) cloud platform, SAP S/4 HANA.

SAP describes the software as the “nerve centre” of the businesses that adopt it. SAP S/4 Hana connects processes, provides live data insights and allows users to gain improved business visibility. The aim is to streamline and scale IT operations (it offers on premises or cloud-based versions).

So What’s Happening?

The collaboration with Accenture will see the two co-develop and jointly go to market with a solution running on SAP S/4HANA Cloud for the oil and gas industry. The public cloud services tool aims to to help oil and gas companies significantly cut operational costs and open new revenue opportunities.

The collaboration with Capgemini meanwhile will be aimed at accelerating a long-term co-development and co-innovation road map for SAP S/4HANA Cloud in discrete manufacturing industries. The initial focus will be on the automotive segment, with a focus on the Industrial Internet of Things, smart automation, machine learning and digital twins.

Deloitte and SAP will focus on the service and process manufacturing industries. The aim is to manage exponential data growth to support “digital transformation” and ” transform digital core capabilities”.

SAP Survey Today Shows AI Demand Rising

This comes after SAP this morning also released their latest global research, where it revealed nine out of 10 business leaders believed that AI was critical for their organisation to survive over the past five years.

When the company compiled their findings for business leaders in the UK, the two big points that came out in the research was that active intelligence (94 percent) and utilising AI to make business decisions (88 percent) were important for businesses to survive in the future.

Changing leadership styles (74 percent) and increasing need for digital assistants (63 percent) were also found to be important for UK business leaders.