Islet­ter High­light: Kari Aar­vala, Microsoft

THROUGH ISLET BINOC­U­LARS: KARI AAR­VALA, DIRECTOR

Tell us a lit­tle bit about your­self and what kind of orga­ni­za­tion & role do you work in?

I cur­rent­ly work for Microsoft­’s West­ern Europe region­al orga­ni­za­tion, respon­si­ble for the “SAP on Azure” busi­ness enti­ty cov­er­ing 12 coun­tries in West­ern Europe (West­ern Europe exclud­ing UK, Ger­many and France, which are sep­a­rate regions). Our goal is to take SAP clients to Azure cloud, help­ing them with cloud trans­for­ma­tion, and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly many clients are also migrat­ing to S/4HANA. Pri­or to this post which start­ed in July, I spent 3.5 years lead­ing the enter­prise seg­ment, a sales unit for larg­er enter­pris­es in Fin­land, and in total my jour­ney in IT has last­ed 33 years, of which I spent 11 years with SAP. My chil­dren have already left home and my wife and I spend time also in Barcelona,​where we have a sec­ond home.

What is Microsoft­’s core mes­sage to its stake­hold­ers and customers?

Dig­i­tal­iza­tion is already here and hap­pen­ing all around us, enabling a huge num­ber of tools and changes to busi­ness. Finnish com­pa­nies have tra­di­tion­al­ly been good at adopt­ing new tech­nol­o­gy, and they should now con­sid­er how to uti­lize dig­i­tal­iza­tion and new tools in their own busi­ness. How to tar­get the mes­sage and bet­ter serve cus­tomers, how to keep employ­ees hap­py, how to improve oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy, how to cre­ate new prod­ucts or ser­vices? Faced with these issues, dig­i­tal­iza­tion, cloud tech­nol­o­gy and oth­er tools can help, accel­er­ate and facil­i­tate. Busi­ness­es can be either pio­neers, go with the mass­es or lag behind. Depend­ing on the indus­try, devel­op­ment can be real­ly fast, and you should get pre­pared for changes in advance.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, Fin­land seems to be a lit­tle behind oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries, and Finns could be bet­ter at grasp­ing new oppor­tu­ni­ties. Dig­i­tal­iza­tion is for every­one and its poten­tial is end­less, regard­less of the core product.

How do you see your indus­try evolv­ing? What mega trends affect the most and how?

Of course, mega trends include cloud com­put­ing, dig­i­tal­iza­tion, urban­iza­tion, and in a sense a pur­suit for indi­vid­u­al­i­ty. Nowa­days the buy­er, be it con­sumer or busi­ness, knows a great deal, because before buy­ing they have done their research and looked into options from many sources. Anoth­er relat­ed and grow­ing trend is that behind tra­di­tion­al IT invest­ments, both financ­ing and mak­ing deci­sions, there are increas­ing­ly busi­ness lines, their needs and financ­ing. As a result, the num­ber of deci­sion-mak­ers is increas­ing and dis­persed. These things are dif­fi­cult to man­age with old ways and tools, there­fore it’s real­ly impor­tant to put togeth­er your own dig­i­tal strat­e­gy. Dig­i­tal­iza­tion is not only about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and machine learn­ing, but it also involves ana­lyt­ics tools, lis­ten­ing to social media, cog­ni­tive ser­vices, etc. — a vast num­ber of things that can be com­bined to find updat­ed busi­ness mod­els rel­e­vant to each business.

Best things about your job?

Export­ing SAP to Azure gives a broad overview of dif­fer­ent coun­tries, cul­tures, cus­tomers and indus­tries across Europe. I con­stant­ly learn a lot, and I can act as a link between dif­fer­ent coun­tries, shar­ing best prac­tices and exam­ples. I trav­el a lot and always come back wis­er. Tak­ing busi­ness sys­tems to the cloud is one of Microsoft­’s glob­al strate­gic focus areas and of course it is inter­est­ing to be at the so-called core. It has its own chal­lenges, but invest­ment, under­stand­ing and inter­est are high. Because busi­ness solu­tions is a big and wide-rang­ing area, work­ing with part­ners and cus­tomers is extreme­ly impor­tant. The part­ners’ knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence of the sys­tems is invalu­able to us.

What are the top three things on your desk­top for next year?

1. Accel­er­ate the migra­tion of busi­ness solu­tions and espe­cial­ly SAP to the cloud, as the dead­line for tran­si­tion to SAP S/4HANA is 2025 (end of sup­port for lega­cy prod­ucts) and migra­tion plan­ning is also time consuming.
2. Increase part­ner knowl­edge and vol­ume. We want to improve our in-depth part­ner knowl­edge of Azure and how to migrate, dri­ve and main­tain var­i­ous busi­ness solu­tions there.
3. The SAP and Microsoft joint project Embrace was released on Octo­ber 20, 2019 and it brings us even clos­er togeth­er. We have an enor­mous amount of com­ple­men­tary exper­tise to provide.

What are the main cri­te­ria for choos­ing a tech­nol­o­gy part­ner? What do you expect from a partner?

The start­ing point is that there must be not only knowl­edge but also a com­mon will and com­mit­ment, as well as per­se­ver­ance. I would quote a cus­tomer who said in con­nec­tion with sales and cus­tomer work that “you can nev­er cre­ate a rela­tion­ship when you need one”. Long-term coop­er­a­tion and sus­tain­able oper­a­tion. Part­ners need to think about their own strengths and invest in them prop­er­ly and in the long run. Of course, the choice of a tech­nol­o­gy part­ner depends on what kind of part­ner we need, what their real­is­tic start­ing point is and how we com­ple­ment each oth­er best. A sim­i­lar world of think­ing and com­pat­i­bil­i­ty of cor­po­rate cul­tures make co-oper­a­tion easier.

Why should com­pa­nies export their ERP sys­tem to Azure? How does Microsoft help its cus­tomers in transformation?

Microsoft has been using SAP sys­tems for over 25 years and is cur­rent­ly run­ning it on Azure, just as SAP itself is run­ning its sys­tem on Azure. We have had a long and fruit­ful coop­er­a­tion, includ­ing sup­port and prod­uct devel­op­ment, so the cus­tomer gets the best of both worlds. Tech­ni­cal­ly, the O365 fam­i­ly already has Azure Active Direc­to­ry, mean­ing SAP is ful­ly inte­grat­ed and all ser­vices are avail­able on a sin­gle sign-on (SSO), both on-premise or mobile basis. Why export an enter­prise resource plan­ning sys­tem to Azure? Our cus­tomers have report­ed a clear improve­ment in sys­tem speed and sta­bil­i­ty. In addi­tion, Microsoft invests a bil­lion a year in secu­ri­ty ser­vices, so cus­tomers can rest assured that we are always up to date with the lat­est secu­ri­ty stan­dards. The biggest ben­e­fit to the cus­tomer is that they get the best of both, thanks to the SAP & Microsoft part­ner­ship, and are able to cross-prod­uct, for exam­ple. Our­selves at Microsoft have 110,000 SAP users and seam­less integration.

We help clients in the process by mak­ing ref­er­ence archi­tec­ture and pro­vid­ing archi­tec­tur­al assis­tance in mod­el­ling and road map cre­ation on how to take the cus­tomer to the cloud. We pro­vide best prac­tice mod­els and tools and work with SAP and the cus­tomer to find the most risk-free, easy, and fastest way to migrate to the cloud with­out delays or dis­rup­tions. Microsoft­’s own SAP was tak­en to the cloud in 2018 and I did­n’t notice the tran­si­tion in any way because there was no down­time. More than half of SAP’s cloud-shipped cus­tomers have tak­en SAP to Azure, and 2/3 are plan­ning a migra­tion. Azure is by far the largest cloud plat­form, so part­ners have a lot of exper­tise by now.

Your mot­to?

Carpe diem – seize the day.

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