SAPverse, MetaSAP, New Rise?

Many of you are familiar with the renaming of Facebook to Meta. With this, Mark Zuckerberg not only takes into account the fact that the company as Facebook calls some other heavyweights its own, such as WhatsApp, Instagram or even hardware like the Oculus VR glasses. That's where an umbrella brand that doesn't just highlight one area can make sense. This has been done before by other companies like Google, which became a subsidiary of Alphabet back in 2015.

More, more, more

But now meta will be more: The metaverse comes into play. You may remember a development nearly 20 years ago. Linden Lab launched what was then a unique and immensely fascinating 3D simulation of an entire world called Second Life in 2003. Here, users could buy virtual goods like real estate, display their real products virtually, even meet with other people via self-selected avatar.

Payment was made with the virtual Linden Dollar. Even though the idea was very interesting and much was discussed and tried out, Second Life did not catch on. From today's perspective, the system had to get by with a less powerful infrastructure almost two decades ago, with simple browsers and many restrictions that like to pinch and tweak such a platform pioneer.

The term metaverse does not originally come from the company Meta, but is taken from the novel "Snow Crash" by science fiction author Neal Stephenson, published in 1991 (!). It is an artificially created virtual reality in which people choose avatars and move freely in an open world. Within the Metaverse, business can be transacted and goods generated. There are interfaces to the real world and to the commodity cycle of the real world. Thus products of the real world can be traded in the metaverse. Communication and events take place in real time. 

Only the future will tell whether Meta will be a great success with this orientation. If we transfer this concept to enterprise solutions, we have completely different possibilities: Imagine SAP offering its customers an infrastructure on a central platform for as many of the activities as possible that a customer does: procurement, production, marketing, sales or service. SAP provides customers with a platform, and SAP solutions provide the associated data and workflows. SAP customers would benefit from fast connectivity and data exchange. Third-party customers are also connected.  

Beginnings are made

With the SAP Extended Reality Cloud (XR Cloud), visualized real-time applications can be created. It is then only a small step to virtual meetings and negotiations. Many companies already have experience with AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality). The free connection of third-party systems is also important. IBM's Supply Chain Intelligence Suite, for example, is a solution that detects future or existing interruptions or delays in supply chains.

For this purpose, different information from various sources is compared with KPIs and evaluated by an AI. The required participants for a resolution room are informed by the AI and solutions are proposed. A cooperation with a SAPverse would extend the data connection and communication. There are very many such solutions deployed by customers. A solution like a SAPverse would help everyone: the SAP customers, the non-SAP customers and of course SAP itself.