Recent ASUG research focused on integration reveals that a majority of SAP customers now have integration strategies in place at their organizations.
Over half (52%) of respondents to the 2025 SAP Integration Research, conducted last fall by SAP and ASUG, indicated their enterprises have established such strategies (a 10% increase from the 2023 research).
The collaboration between SAP and ASUG examined how 136 participants navigate integration challenges, develop strategies, and leverage SAP Integration Suite to drive business success. In a recent ASUG webcast, teams from ASUG, SAP, and National Bank gathered to share findings from the research. Here are some key insights from the discussion.
Types of Integration Projects
Integration between systems is important for scalability and growth, especially as organizations look to implement new initiatives and spur innovation.
“Having an integration strategy is definitely essential for any new initiative,” said Diana Abraham, Product Marketing Manager for SAP Integration Suite. Having a clear road map for connecting various systems and applications will help organizations adapt to new challenges and make sure that internal teams can respond quickly to the various changing customer and market needs.
ASUG and SAP research found that, across every integration type, projects overall increased in 2025 compared to 2023. The most common integration type is SAP-to-non-SAP applications (88%), followed by SAP-to-SAP integrations (81%), and non-SAP-to-non-SAP integrations (65%). These findings align with what SAP is seeing, Abraham said, adding that SAP-to-non-SAP integrations being most relevant to respondents is an indication of the increased complexity and variety of applications needed to support business functions.
One factor likely accelerating all these integrations is the upcoming deadline for SAP ECC support, which is top-of-mind for SAP customers, said Blake Baltazar, Senior Project and Research Analyst at ASUG.
Standardized Tools in SAP Integration Suite
SAP tools are the main component of integration strategies, and respondents identified the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Integration Suite and SAP S/4HANA as their key tools.
Compared to 2023 research, strategies have become more technically driven, and respondents are defining and sourcing all data elements before creating clear governance. Aligning and standardizing processes is key to a successful integration, Baltazar added.
Sai Krishna Kalivarapu, Senior Director at National Bank, joined the webcast to share some of his company’s integration journey. His team aligned with many of the research’s findings. According to Kalivarapu, National Bank is leveraging SAP BTP Integration Suite for most of its SAP integrations, following the suite’s road map. The team is creating clear technical governance for various systems, with a domain-driven strategy and API-first strategy, and they align processes between the domains, standardizing how the company exchanges data.
For respondents to the SAP and ASUG research who are already using SAP Integration Suite, they were asked to rate the most valuable capabilities and features. Respondents indicated that cloud integration is the most valuable (85%), closely followed by open connectors (80%), API management (79%), and prebuilt integrations managed and updated by SAP (74%).
While "event mesh" and "training partner management" were rated less highly than other capabilities, that isn’t an accurate indication of their value to enterprises, Abraham said. Rather, these are newer features that SAP anticipates more organizations benefitting from in the future, especially if they are prioritizing real-time processing or implementing event-driven architectures, which event mesh can handle.
The same goes for trading partner management. “We do anticipate that the value of this will go up as more organizations are looking to improve their supply chain processes or their partner integrations,” Abraham said.
Staffing Integration Projects
Research respondents indicated that they’re using a mix of both internal and external resources to manage their integration projects. But compared to previous data, there’s a 16% increase in skill building among existing internal staff. “It’s great to see because from our last study, a key recommendation to improve integration projects was to build up that internal skill set within organizations,” Baltazar said. In terms of external resources, respondents indicated the hiring of consultants decreased by five percent.
The research is reflective of National Bank’s hiring processes. The team was at first hesitant to move to the SAP Integration Suite, because it represents an entirely new skill set. But they instead focused on upskilling, learning best practices, and subscribing to SAP training sessions.
“So now my team is very much comfortable in doing the BTP Integration Suite,” Kalivarapu said.
And when there is a spike in urgent requirements, consultants are helpful. But in the long term, “keeping this skill set internally and improving the knowledge really helps us,” he said.
Integration Challenges
The research also shows that, overall, integration challenges have increased in recent years. Budget constraints (43%), data inconsistencies (40%), and then incompatibilities between SAP and non-SAP applications (39%) are listed as top challenges, which also sharply increased since 2023. “As customers are implementing more and more integration projects, there’s a greater chance for more challenges to arise,” Baltazar said.
This finding is also echoed in the 2025 Pulse of the SAP Customer research, which polled approximately 800 respondents who indicated budgeting is a top challenge.
National Bank is similarly indicating there is a budget for its integration projects, Kalivarapu said. To solve this, his team takes on small projects and then establishes integration patterns, identifying senders and receivers, establishing security processes, and articulating adapters these processes use. When future integration challenges arise, the template is leveraged as a reference resource. While it takes time up front to establish patterns, it becomes much easier to solve these problems in the long run, saving time and money.
SAP knows that many organizations are faced with resource constraints, Abraham said, adding that prioritizing internal skill building will help ensure the team is able to manage complex integration scenarios. She also encouraged enterprises to adopt one consolidated integration solution with the set of features to help simplify the integration process overall, reduce costs, and improve connectivity in general. SAP also provides prebuilt content and integrations, which help address some of these challenges, she added, pointing the audience to the SAP Business Accelerator Hub as a resource to test different integration options.
Benefits Post-Integration
Despite the integration challenges SAP customers encounter, these hurdles are also helping enterprises drive innovation and system improvements.
“Although more integration projects can amplify challenges, they’re also paving the way for value,” Baltazar said.
Top benefits realized from integrating data processes and/or applications included streamlined business processes (76%) and improved use of data and analytics (72%), both noted by over 70% of respondents. Integration helped to drive better adoption of applications (62%), improve visibility into processes (54%), and provide intelligence to drive decision-making (52%). All these benefits saw increases compared to 2023 data. “As members are tackling more integration projects head on, they’re reaping greater rewards,” Baltazar said.
At National Bank, Kalivarapu’s team streamlined the business processes by externalizing most of the transformations that are not needed in the SAP business systems, adding those on the integration layer, he said. This simplified the architecture, so projects are delivered in an agile fashion.
Integration Advice
The research found that ASUG members are recommending an almost equal emphasis on standardized preconfigured solutions and APIs (60%), and also internal alignment of integration strategies across the organization (57%), closely followed by advancing internal knowledge of internal solutions and capabilities (55%).
“There has to be an equal prioritization of the technical aspects married with those organizational skill building, executive support, and also strategy alignment,” Baltazar said. “All those things need to interact with each other in order to really leverage integrations.”
Specifically, executive support makes a huge difference in leveraging integrations, she added. “It seems like a no-brainer, but when you see it come out in the research, it gives you a really great thing to lean on to say, ‘If we have your support throughout the process, it’s going to help us realize benefits and leverage projects better for business transformations and especially with integrations.”