SAP Changes the Game With a New Generation of Planning in the Cloud

New, Cloud-Based, People-Centric Offering Aims to Help Businesses Plan Simpler

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Oct 13, 2014, 03:30 ET

CHICAGO, Oct. 13, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Committed to delivering the innovation and agility companies need to defeat complexity and do highly sophisticated planning more simply, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced the SAP® Cloud for Planning solution. A planned new, future-oriented enterprise performance management (EPM) solution, it is designed around user experience and built for the cloud. SAP Cloud for Planning aims to help customers plan simpler through a consumer app-like user experience with in-context collaboration and analytics. This announcement was made at the SAP Conference for EPM being held October 13-14, 2014 in Chicago.

The future SAP Cloud for Planning solution will be built natively on SAP HANA® Cloud Platform, the in-memory platform-as-a-service (PaaS) from SAP. It is intended to be a people-centric solution designed to help simplify financial planning and analysis. Finance and other line of business professionals are envisioned to eliminate the complexity of their planning processes and quickly integrate corporate and divisional plans to drive better results with fact-based decision-making.

"Businesses are increasingly more insistent on having a choice of deployment for their most critical applications such as those that deliver better transparency into data and offer planning and analytical insight," said Henry Morris, senior vice president, Worldwide Software, Services, and Sales and Marketing Executive Advisory Research Groups, IDC.

SAP Cloud for Planning aims to usher in a new generation of planning in the cloud with a modern look and feel and a natural flow between planning and analysis. It shall enable people to plan and simulate at any level of detail, with any number of users, at any time without having to wait.

The planned solution is designed with embedded analytics and collaboration capabilities, which can enable people to plan, analyze and discuss in-context versus having to jump to another screen or application. Extensive reporting capabilities are planned to be built directly into the application with the SAP Fiori® user interface and dashboards embedded, which provide a modern look and feel.

"SAP is simplifying analytics and eliminating the need for different tools," said Steve Lucas, president, Platform Solutions, SAP. "Unlike other offerings, SAP Cloud for Planning is designed around how people want to work. Users are intended to collaborate on plans in a natural way, rather than being forced to work within a technology-driven system. Built on the advanced cloud platform — SAP HANA Cloud Platform — this solution is planned to give people the ability to drive new levels of innovation, extend investments, and adapt business processes faster than ever before."

For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 261,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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