Keeping ahead of SAP’s new products and initiatives requires constant vigilance. The first quarter of 2025 was hardly underway before SAP outlined a new iteration of its continuously evolving database strategy. The February introduction of the SAP Business Data Cloud followed fast on the 2023 announcement of SAP Datasphere, itself an evolution of SAP’s Data Warehouse Cloud, announced in 2019. Coming down the road in Q2, even before the flurry of announcements targeted for Sapphire in May, are a significant set of enhancements to Business Networks, Ariba, Fieldglass, and SAP’s industries strategy.
Looking back, 2024 also started with a bang, and never seemed to stop. In fact, calling 2024 a momentous year in the SAP ecosystem risks sounding like an understatement. Big changes in technology and product strategy, new faces on the SAP board, more tweaks to SAP’s approach to getting customers to move to the cloud, and a new focus on enterprise architects are just a few of the highlights.
That said, it took until ASUG Tech Connect in November for the year to come together in a way that, at least for me, put all those changes in perspective. It was there in West Palm Beach that I realized that a key piece of the puzzle had been sorely missing throughout 2024, something that had become absolutely necessary for everyone—ASUG members, SAP, and its partners—to succeed in 2025.
What was missing? Two things, really:
- A solid set of well-defined business cases, aimed squarely at customers’ IT and line of business leaders, for upgrading to S/4HANA from SAP and its partners, and:
- A solid understanding, on the part of customers’ IT leadership, of how to take these new business cases for moving to the cloud and evangelize them to their line of business counterparts.
Sure, there were plenty of case studies and users talking about their cloud journeys at conferences and in webinars throughout the year. But translating those often-impressive use cases to fit the specific needs of the majority of SAP customers proved harder than anyone had realized.
The SAP installed base is too varied and too highly customized to take many of these examples of life in SAP Cloud ERP at face value. “I can’t find a business case strong enough to pry those ECC screens away from my business users” remained the reality for many customers I spoke to at events from SAP Sapphire to ASUG Tech Connect, as well as in myriad other conversations throughout the year.
This problem continues to be endemic to the SAP ecosystem, as confirmed by SAP CEO Christian Klein during the Q4 2024 financial analyst call. In answer to an analyst’s question, Klein confirmed that only 40 percent of customers had moved to RISE and S/4HANA, leaving 60 percent of SAP’s existing customers still sitting on the fence.
Importantly, these business cases were not only missing from SAP’s own messaging. They were also absent from the conversations that partners were having with customers, and, perhaps most tellingly, they were missing from the conversations between IT and LOB stakeholders within the customer organizations themselves. The small sample of customers I’d spoken with who couldn’t make a business case for moving to the cloud turned out to be pretty representative of the entire ecosystem.
This lack of real, repeatable business cases for S/4HANA caused a lot of collateral damage along the way: With SAP gating access to cloud-based innovation by making RISE a prerequisite for acquiring net-new innovation, the lack of an S/4HANA business case limited the number of customers choosing RISE in 2024 and continues to stall the development of business cases for S/4HANA and other important parts of the SAP portfolio in 2025. The fact that elements of innovative capabilities like AI, carbon reporting, advanced analytics, and planning could, at least officially, only be obtained with a RISE contract meant that a lot of customers opted instead to wait for better business cases and/or better contract terms and conditions to emerge.
What’s unfortunate about the lack of business cases and their impact on cloud adoption is that it’s not due to a lack of capability. There are many solid business cases for moving to S/4HANA and the cloud – enhanced cybersecurity, regulatory compliance-as-a-service, localization-as-a-service, and real-time supply-chain visibility are just the beginning of a long list of compelling business reasons for moving off ECC.
Touchstones for Action in 2025
The perception that RISE and S/4HANA Cloud are lacking business cases that can appeal to the line of business leaders need not be the default position for 2025 as well.
The good news for ASUG members is that the business case for moving to S/4HANA can make even more sense in 2025 than ever before, as long as customers take the initiative to learn how and why S/4HANA makes sense for both IT and the line of business.
Here are six recommendations for how ASUG members can further their efforts to reach the cloud in 2025 in ways that make sense for their business needs:
- Assemble internal and external resources for building business cases for the move to the cloud, and start building those cases as soon as possible. Assuming that business users—particularly laggards who say they are content with using the systems they are already have—will make the case for the move to the cloud on their own is, for many companies, a dead end. It’s up to IT leaders, along with enterprise architects, to lead the charge by helping these business users do the research and find the use cases most relevant to their organizations.
- Get to know the business functionality SAP offers beyond S/4HANA. Building a business case for the SAP cloud means understanding the net-new functionality in SAP Business Network, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, SAP Concur, SAP Integrated Business Planning, and the rest of the portfolio. Pay particular attention to how these applications can be integrated to drive end-to-end processes in your organization, because that’s where the greatest business value often lies. Whether the end-to-end process vision originates in the office of the CIO, the CFO, or a specific line of business, an understanding of the growing capability of SAP’s cloud portfolio to drive end-to-end process excellence, even in heterogeneous landscapes that depend on non-SAP applications, needs to become part of your company’s strategic vision.
- Set the stage for change management, everywhere. Much of the reluctance in moving from the old to the new can be traced back to an innate human dislike, if not outright fear, of change. The best way to combat that fear is to engage users in the change management process from the start and make sure to keep them engaged throughout. And be aware that anything resembling “game-changing” technology will need a serious change-management effort in order to succeed.
- Build your internal knowledge about SAP’s business transformation suite and its main components: SAP Signavio, SAP Cloud ALM, SAP LeanIX, and WalkMe. And don’t forget to keep building out your BTP expertise as well. These tools don’t just help drive successful implementations; they also go a long way towards developing a business case that makes sense for your business stakeholders.
- Build your organization’s internal enterprise architect competencies and knowledge. Enterprise architect isn’t a single job or a single task list — in most companies you’ll need a range of skills and capabilities to master the technological and business requirements required to fill this increasingly vital role.
- Look into the possibility of building an SAP Center of Excellence that can be a locus on all things SAP for your business users, enterprise architects, and IT staff. This can be the space for folding the above requirements into a usable, renewable resource, putting a COE in place will help leverage this important part of your company’s technology and business landscape.
This year augurs well for companies that have been sitting on the fence with regard to migrating to S/4HANA. The changes in support for ECC that were discussed during the Q4 2024 earning call—which will effectively allow ECC customers, especially those with complex landscapes, more time to migrate to S/4HANA Cloud—are a strong signal to the SAP ecosystem that SAP is taking a pragmatic approach to supporting customers in 2025.
SAP’s efforts to support its customers’ journeys in 2025 will also include a growing emphasis on line-of-business decision makers and influencers, as evidenced by a new series of SAP events targeted for October that will focus on telling these business use cases to leaders in supply chain, sales and customer experience, human resources, procurement, and the office of the CFO. Attending these new “connect” events, along with ASUG Tech Connect this fall, should be in your company’s plans.
So, buckle up for another year. While many of the details about changes to ECC support and other such issues are pending, it’s clear that 2025 will be an important year for solidifying long-standing plans to move to the cloud at a pace that works best for customers. And building solid business cases for the move to the cloud will be a big part of those plans. It’s going to take a lot of work to get it right, but the stage is set for success as never before.
Joshua Greenbaum is Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.