SINGAPORE -- Europe’s largest software firm SAP is seeking to bring innovation to business models in various industries by putting game-changing technology into the hands of business leaders.

“Many companies and traditional businesses are using the HANA platform to leverage big data and predictive analytics in real time,” SAP Asia-Pacific Japan president Adaire Fox-Martin said during a press conference in Singapore on Thursday.

“By 2020 the size of the digital economy is expected to be $9 trillion.”

Referring to Asia-Pacific businesses that are deeply engaged in digital strategy, including the popular Korean messenger app KakaoTalk, she stressed such early adopters are achieving 9 percent plus revenue creation and at least 26 percent impact to profitability via a high-tech computer-based approach.

HANA is one of the most innovative platforms currently available, holistically connecting people, devices and business networks in real time.

Five years after first introducing HANA in 2010, it released the fourth-generation platform S/4 HANA in February with 13,000 clients already registered.

Saying that complexity is an obstacle to digitization, Fox-Martin said the mantra in SAP and S/4 HANA is “running simple is the answer to success in the digital age.”

“Standardization is not simplification. It is simplification that gives you the opportunity to react fast and agile to the changes,” she added.

With the platform, some businesses have even seen their business models transform, including Asia’s third-largest paint company, Asian Paints.

“Asian Paints was just a paint manufacturer. (After using HANA) they moved beyond a paint manufacturer to service company providing interior solutions, such as providing customers data of the total cost to modernize the house,” said Paul Marriott, the SAP regional arm’s senior vice president of platform solutions.

The German IT solutions firm believes small and medium-sized enterprises should be part of the move, as less than a quarter of global SMEs are ready for digital trends.

“Almost 4 out of 5 of SAP customers (77 percent) are SMEs. The challenges (facing large corporations) exist equally for smaller customers,” Marriott said.

This digital approach is also seen from the SAP Digital Boardroom, a new set of tools that will redefine yesterday’s board room to succeed in today’s digital economy, according to the company.

Using line-of-business data from the S/4 HANA suit, SAP Cloud for Analytics and SAP HANA Cloud Platform, Digital Boardroom contextualize and simplify performance reporting the whole business areas in real time.

It allows business executives to make quick decisions with broad database in a sight, leaving behind weeks or months of meetings’ worth of paperwork.

“The solution provides total transparency and efficiency to executives and decision-makers with a real-time view of broad information and performance,” said Scott Russell, the company’s chief operating officer.

Russell noted that in export-dependent countries like South Korea, businesses with global operations should be able to make better decisions based on current status and performance.

“They’re able to make faster decisions with information at their fingertips and make better decisions. Those better decisions come from getting data-driven insights this solution provides, together with their rich experience and knowledge about the industry they’re operating in,” Russell explained.

Daniel Nimmo, the company’s chief customer officer, said he had also seen some challenges in persuading Korean or Japanese companies to adopt SAP solutions, due to their strong hierarchical corporate culture.

“The challenge in Korea has always been the hierarchical (system) so there are many layers in decision-making. It’s very hard for Korean and Japanese companies in particular to move away from that model. But once you get them to that initial step (to experience the solution and its agility) the metrics will tell their own story,” he said.

By Suk Gee-hyun, Korea Herald correspondent (monicasuk@heraldcorp.com)