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The Renewable Enterprise: Servitization with SAP and Microsoft!

Alex Bulat
June 11, 2020

Don鈥檛 find customers for your products, find products for your customers 鈥擲eth Godin. This quote fits aptly into the history of servitization, where the term was first coined in the 1980s and can be traced back to the 1960s when Rolls-Royce created its 鈥減ower-by-the-hour鈥 concept, which sold fully maintained aero engine use by the hour rather than by the unit.

Simply explained, servitization is the concept of not just selling your products but also having additional services around your products or renting your products based on running hours. So, how does a concept that is already 60 years old become the talk of the town? Because, in this age of intelligent enterprise and digital transformation, it all comes down to effective asset management. With affordable technological capabilities now having caught up with the theoretical concepts, are you being bold in reexamining your business model?

As I penned my thoughts, I asked my good friends and fellow experts (, , , ) to help me integrate all the experiences based on a project we did for a big railway company in Europe (contracts dictate everything is anonymized, including the architecture, etc.), so I鈥檒l do my best to give the most succinct yet comprehensive description I can.

Depending on the type of servitization model, the benefit you鈥檝e expecting from servitization, the maturity level to overcome the barriers to servitization, your roadmap, impact on applications, business processes, and platforms all vary. It鈥檚 not something I can cover in one blog post nor is it the intent of this particular one. Instead, I鈥檒l focus on some things you need for servitization to work once you determine that it is relevant to your industry and organization:

  • Your assets have sensors, right?
  • The sensor captures data, but how do they send it? Understand your network (5G plays a significant role but this is a separate topic).
  • Storing data and analyzing it brings the machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data lakes aspects.
  • Now that we know what is happing with the assets, actions need to be taken. We need a transactional system to be able to do this.

Building such an architecture is not easy. 乌鸦传媒 envisages a best-of-breed architecture that we have tested and run. 

From a service provider standpoint, I begin discussions with clients by saying, 鈥To deliver an outcome effectively, you need to let me understand what you really care about.鈥 This architecture has the components you need to run servitization in your organization. As you can see, we leverage a multi-cloud, multi-vendor architecture to make sure you have the best components. Best of breed doesn鈥檛 mean expensive. Instead, we focus on the price and value of running this IT solution so it doesn鈥檛 kill your 鈥減ower by the hour鈥 business model.

乌鸦传媒鈥檚 Renewable Enterprise allows you to align your transformation with your real business priorities irrespective of your landscape. I hope this helps you in your thought process. Let鈥檚 talk. Contact me directly to find out whether servitizaton and/or delivering an intelligent enterprise with SAP and Microsoft is in your cards.

Alex Bulat

Group Technology VP
Alex is Group Technology Director, focused on helping our customers transform and adopt to the new digital age, and integrate new and disruptive innovations into their business. He is focused on driving the expansion and delivery of digital transformation and helping companies to get a grasp on future technologies like IoT, AI, Big data and Blockchain. He also focuses on how new innovations, disruptive technologies, and new platforms like Uber, impact the current businesses.