UPDATED 16:29 EDT / FEBRUARY 10 2014

SAP overhauls cloud-based training hub

student studying laptop cloud outsideSAP is taking a page from Cloudera’s bookdoubling down on education as part of a push to regain solid footing in the modern enterprise, where an increasing emphasis on productivity growth is driving a transition from traditional on-premise software to cloud services. The German business intelligence giant last week updated its online training center in hopes of killing two birds with one stone and address this shift while tackling social collaboration, another aspect of IT consumerization that is proving increasingly important in improving employee performance.

Launched in 2012 after the acquisition of SuccessFactors, the SAP Learning Hub is based on the cloud HR provider’s content management and analytics platform and integrates with the Jam enterprise social networking solution. The site, which is now used by more than 230 organizations, has been been expanded to include SAP’s entire catalog of educational resources, which consists of more than 2,000 manuals and handbooks as well as a selection of live courses.

Customers can purchase access to the library on a per-user subscription basis, a stark departure from the vendor’s notoriously complex pricing scheme. Additionally, more than 120 titles are available for free through a “discovery” edition that allows CIOs to sample the product before committing to a major purchase.

“We want to increase the reach of enablement and training for SAP skills in the market from the 500,000 people we train annually to the estimated three to four million professionals who use SAP systems every day”, said Markus Schwarz, the senior vice president and global head of SAP Education. “With the expanded SAP Learning Hub, we have taken key technologies from the SAP Cloud portfolio to change both our business model and our learning approach to offer an entirely new learning experience.”

The role of educating about the cloud, in the cloud

 

It’s up to cloud service providers to help close the gap on data experts and data solutions, considering the scalability issues of educating more college graduates as specialized data scientists. “There’s no way to scale enough PhD’s in data science,” says Michael Rappa, Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University in an interview with theCUBE.

For his school, data scientists are met with open arms from the work force, graduating Six straight classes from the Institute graduate with full employment. Rappa notes that students in the Institute “are the highest paid and most sought after” and believes, “if we do this with 80 students, we could be doing this with 800.” He suggests there is a great need for people educated at a master’s level with understanding of master’s level statistics. While universities produce so many M.B.A.’s, Rappa says, “we need more graduating with a deeper knowledge of how to deal with data.”

The social aspect of data generation and analysis will help service providers automate and educate existing employees for the workplace, especially as social data proves its worth when crafting for and providing access to learning material. “We’re starting to realize there’s value in ingesting social data and we’re trying to understand what we can do with that,” says Steve Keller, a Staff Software Engineer with Citrix.

Keller goes on to explain his company’s use of Tableau software for data visualization, noting the benefits of its educational material when handing down new products to Citrix developers. It’s an approach SAP, Cloudera, IBM and others are taking to not only evangelize their products, but build in the support to establish their services for the long haul.

written by Maria Deutscher and Kristen Nicole Martin
photo credit: danisabella via photopin cc

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