There’s been no shortage of talk lately about the transformative potential of cloud-native solutions, including cloud ERP enhanced by AI and automation, in driving enterprise innovation and operational agility. The transformative potential of AI and agents is opening up a whole new vector of growth.

With that in mind, one new announcement made this week was GROW with SAP on AWS. SAP SE’s software-as-a-service ERP solution, which is S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, is now available for purchase on the AWS Marketplace, according to Jan Gilg (pictured), president and chief product officer of cloud ERP at SAP.

“As you can imagine, an ERP solution is not something necessarily you can just buy and then activate,” he said. “It is a private listing, so to speak. You can find it, but then you basically can request to get more information on the product. Those requests, they go directly to our partners, because we do have a pretty substantial set of partners that are GROW partners for us, but they are also AWS partners.”

Gilg spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante for theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent coverage,” during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the role of cloud ERP in modernizing enterprise operations and the integration of AI-driven automation to enhance business processes.

Cloud ERP solutions outlined

There is some complexity that is inherent to ERP. Companies need to map it to business processes, according to Gilg.

“We ship actually what we call best practice processes, already out of the box, with the solution,” he said. “We say, ‘Hey, over the last 50 years we’ve done quite a few ERP implementations with customers, and based on that, we know how standard processes typically work.’ That’s what we ship with the product.”

The question remains: When customers talk about moving to the cloud, why cloud ERP? First and foremost, they get access to innovation, Gilg explained.

“We come from an on-premise world, where customers basically install the ERP solution and then they’re fully in charge for it,” he said. “But we have seen customers struggle with upgrading … with that they have no possibility to consume any innovation that we are shipping as part of our regular innovation updates that we provide, like any other SaaS company. That is actually, from my perspective, one of the key drivers.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s “Cloud AWS re:Invent Coverage”:

Photo: SiliconANGLE