Standing out in the Digital Economy - Software AG unveils the World’s first Digital Business Platform

Responding to today’s rapidly digitizing economies and new competitive landscapes, Software AG presented its Digital Business Platform at CeBIT the world’s largest IT expo. The Digital Business Platform enables enterprises to adapt to the fast changes and huge opportunities, in both the private and public sectors, driven by the growth of the global digital economy. The European Commission estimates that the digital economy will reach €3.2 trillion, in the G20 countries alone, by 2016 and already accounts for 8 percent of GDP. Software AG has recognized that standard, conventional, packaged business software, designed for relatively stable and predictable business situations, cannot provide the flexibility, agility and speed needed to address today’s digitized customers’ and citizens’ requirements. The Digital Business Platform instead focuses on fostering co-innovation between Software AG, its partners and customers to quickly develop and deploy adaptive and differentiating applications and business solutions.

Addressing the Full Spectrum of Business and IT innovation

Software AG’s Digital Business Platform operates at the interface between real-time business operations and changing customer and market requirements. It allows the fast and cost effective development and deployment of a new type of customer facing, front office business applications and solutions in a time frame that maximizes return on investment. It also provides a comprehensive approach to designing and implementing the flexible and cost effective IT architectures needed to support these adaptive applications. The Digital Business Platform is therefore of interest to many departments within the enterprise. From the CIO implementing an optimal, cost effective and flexible IT architecture to departmental business managers who need to quickly develop adaptive applications at the individual, departmental or divisional levels. The DPM is also of interest to the CEO who needs to develop an enterprise wide digital strategy.

From a Static to an Agile Business

“Today’s enterprises must become digital to have maximum visibility into changing market behavior, individual customer requirements, its own business operations across the entire supply chain as well as changing external parameters such as new government regulations or even weather conditions”, said Software AG CTO, Wolfram Jost. “The Digital Business Platform provides the foundation necessary to develop and deploy differentiating business applications, developed together with the business departments, in short and easily foreseeable release cycles. Traditional packaged applications are not designed for this type of development approach”.

The Built to Change Business

The Digital Business Platform is designed to deliver applications, processes, business models and enterprises “built to change”, to respond to real-time business events or fast changing market conditions. Unlike conventional ERP products, designed to deliver off-the-shelf software for long-term, existing, predictable business situations and processes, the Digital Business Platform provides a rich portfolio for customers and partners, in collaboration with Software AG, to co-innovate less predictable, flexible, differentiating and profit driving business solutions. Solutions adaptive to events driven by the Internet of Things, streaming analytics and big data.

Business Driven by the Internet of Things

“The benefits of analyzing data from the Internet of Things, from the social end of the spectrum to machine to machine communication (M2M), making in-depth business decisions based on the information provided and dynamically adapting business processes and models to react to ‘live’ events are enormous”, continued Wolfram Jost. “Providing a holistic approach that can manage and govern IT assets and automated business processes, on-premise and cloud integration and advanced analytics, based on an in-memory and event driven architecture, is the only way that enterprises can fully utilize digitization. This is our philosophy behind the Digital Business Platform”.