Will the year 2022 be the year of Lidar's take off, with the emergence of applications as varied as they were and unsuspected applications outside of the autonomous car? The year 2021 marks a turning point with the listing of a dozen or so Lidar companies, all American and Chinese. They now have the means to invest in making products more efficient and more accessible.

Lidar (light imaging and detection and ranging) is a sensor that gives machines 3D perception of their environment. By scanning its environment with a laser beam, it detects objects and people in the vicinity and allows to evaluate how far away they are. It is considered a key instrument for driver assistance systems and autonomous cars. "Compared to other detection devices such as cameras, radars and infrared sensors, Lidar offers the advantage of giving a 360-degree perception of the environment over a distance of several hundred meters, with an important notion of volume for the detection of trucks, for example," estimates Raul Bravo co-founder and CEO of Outsight, a French nugget specializing in Lidar data pre-processing software.

Although Lidar may seem like a revolutionary, state-of-the-art creation, it is a long-standing technology. However, it is a 45 year old technology that was originally developed by NASA and the U.S. Army to track lunar and satellite distances. The first commercial Lidar was used in 1995 in a United States Geological Survey project to map vegetation growth on Assateague Island.

Today, automakers see the technology as the next big step in road safety for autonomous cars.

Today, it is a fact that SAP skills are in short supply. As a matter of fact, quarter of users believes that the long-rumoured shortage is holding back projects.

IT teams don't have enough skills to fully meet the expectations of the business functions of companies that use SAP business systems.

That's the view of ASUG, the U.S. SAP user club. The shortage is such that it "is creating a major disruption in many of our member companies," said Geoff Scott, CEO of the collective, as noted by The Register.

Integration, support, upgrades... 26% of the organizations concerned consider the lack of SAP skills as a major obstacle to the successful deployment of projects.

This is particularly the case when it comes to migrating to the SAP S/4HANA integrated management suite, running on the in-memory HANA base, cloud or on-premise.

S/4HANA in production

31% of the 600 organizations surveyed have already deployed S/4HANA in production, 42% are planning to do so. However, for 49% of the organizations concerned, the lack of skills about the software platform is problematic, including external partners, whether they are system integrators or independent consultants.

Of the companies that report integration difficulties, 28% point to the spread of data errors, 17% to incompatibilities between SAP systems and third-party applications. Another 17% believe they are no longer able to keep up with the pace of technological change.

In France, according to a survey by the French-speaking SAP users' club (USF), this time 56% of the 163 companies and administrations questioned last year judged the German group's strategy for SAP S/4HANA positively. However, a third of the respondents still have reservations about the adaptability of the offering to market developments.

On the other hand, the maintenance extension of S/4HANA, until 2040, and Business Suite 7, including the ERP Central Component (ECC), until 2030, is appreciated. Above all, the level of expertise of SAP consultants on technical solutions receives 80% positive opinions, even if 69% of respondents consider the daily cost of these same consultants "unjustified"...

Source: www.silicon.fr