DailyPost 2736
WILL S/4HANA BE TRANSFORMATIVE?
While we keep talking of IT behemoths who have dominated the world digital landscape for a long team and are likely to remain ahead in the foreseeable future, yet we tend to miss out on the ERP leader and more so with the onset of AI. The enterprises cannot look ahead for comprehensive digital transformation if the ERP does not deliver the same seamlessly. SAP has been ruling the ERP market for a long time to the extent that SAP is treated as a synonym for ERP. S/4HANA happens to their most transformative offering, released in 2015, with in-memory database and cloud at its core, has still to go a long way.
It was the biggest SAP in two decades. Gartner called it a “transformational shift” but had raised questions about functionality, availability, pricing and migration issue. We have crossed nine years of its release, but still it is not catching on the customers fancy as was expected. Interestingly we are only talking of enterprises who are already on this ERP software. We don’t have Indian data in place, so we will relevant data of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, provided by DSAG, which happens to be a group representing SAP user in those countries.
In a fast moving IT enabled digital enterprises, it was found that the most used SAP product was still its traditional ERP line, with 68% of the respondents using it, as compared to 41% for S/4HANA on-premises and 11% and 6% for respectively for S/4HANA private public cloud. The first spoke in the wheel is the cloud strategy. Some customers see need for more discussion on SAP’s prolonged move to the cloud. The survey showed that the perception on SAP’s cloud strategy was highly mixed. The gains have been meagre in last so many years. In real numbers only 13% had a positive opinion. The dampening disclosure is that a little under half has a negative perception.
Security and AI are next in line of the grave challenges to get the customer buy in. 88% of the surveyed rated security of medium or high relevance. The number of companies ready to invest in S/4HANA for AI considerations has risen to 28%, doubling in last two years. Unfortunately, only 31% rate the company’s AI strategy as good or satisfactory. SAP is not seen as leading partner in transformative technologies like AI and cloud. SAP is in the midst of cloud transition, while AWS, Azure and Google Cloud have taken the lead. In AI, for S/4HANA a unified layer called Datasphere should prove it critical capabilities for businesses. The acquisition like Signavio may add the much-needed data mining and mapping capabilities.
ENTERPRISE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH S/4HANA, AI ENABLED ON THE CLOUD, SEEMS TO BE STILL FAR OFF.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.