Few at SAP are better-qualified to speak to the evolution of the company’s cloud ERP portfolio than Jan Gilg, President and Chief Product Officer, Cloud ERP.
An 18-year veteran of SAP, Gilg has served as Global Head of Enterprise Architecture, Global Head of IT Business Services, and SVP & Head of SAP S/4HANA. That last position, which Gilg started at the beginning of 2019, expanded a year later to encompass SAP’s digital supply chain portfolio, leading to his current role, in which he’s responsible for digital supply chain and SAP’s cloud ERP.
As adoption of cloud ERP solutions continues to accelerate in the SAP community, ahead of maintenance deadlines that start to take effect at the end of next year, SAP is focused on providing its customers with technology and services to facilitate moving mission-critical ERP processes to the cloud. In recognition of this push, SAP was recently named a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric and Service-Centric Enterprises for the third consecutive year.
In the second half of a wide-ranging conversation, the first half of which you can read here, Gilg recently discussed the evolution of the enterprise architect role in the SAP ecosystem and the potential of generative AI to transform the ERP landscape.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
One of the key RISE updates of the year, from our perspective, is the addition of enterprise architects for RISE customers, as announced at SAP Sapphire. What can you share about recent progress on that front?
This is a topic I’m passionate about. I used to be an enterprise architect myself—however you define that role, which was even a struggle back in the on-premises days. Even then, though, an enterprise architect was needed, and that’s only become more the case as customers become larger and more complex, as their landscapes become more complex.
We look at EAs now as becoming the CTO for the customer, right? We’re taking over the IT landscape, and we’ve broadened our lens much more; it’s not only about moving ECC but about moving your entire landscape, which consists of the SAP Business Suite, with SAP Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), with SAP Customer Relationship Management (CRM), with SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), and so on.
Everything eventually needs to move into the cloud, and the EA is exactly the person that helps to map that out, leveraging the tooling that we provide as part of RISE, such as SAP Signavio for the business process side, to document the enterprise architecture and data flows. It’s clear that the cloud offers a very superior model for companies to run their IT infrastructure, but the price of this is always integration, as we ship more capabilities as SaaS components. That’s also true in the private cloud, on SAP BTP; if you look at Joule, our digital assistant, at our AI cases, new innovations come on BTP. Customers expect that they fit and work seamlessly together; the EA ensures this while keeping an eye on the implementation side, when it comes to the clean core. They’re looking at the dashboard, working with the implementation partner, holding them accountable, guiding them on our clean-core guideline and strategies.
There’s pressure on our side to find enough people to do that. Certainly, the complexity varies depending on the size of the customer; BMW, for instance, has a full-time enterprise architect, whereas multiple customers that are smaller can be served by one EA. We are ramping up heavily in our services organization and reskilling people into that role, which also shows that the role of our services organization is changing. It’s not about the project timeline but about helping our customers to adopt our solutions, which is part of the value proposition in the cloud. Otherwise, it doesn't work. We’re transforming our services function toward that. The goal here is not simply to optimize the project implementation timeline, but to help customers to adopt and to keep our ecosystem in line with our strategy. That’s a core element of our RISE offering.
Read ASUG's recap of keynote stage announcements made at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference in 2024.
Are you seeing more IT professionals serve as these EAs, or are professionals on the business side equally well-suited to fit into that role? What are the skills that allow EAs to succeed?
That’s such an interesting question, and it’s been around as long as the role of the enterprise architect has been around. You can certainly approach it from both sides. I’ve seen both happen, and I think both scenarios are needed. I almost look at it as a primary and secondary focus of an enterprise architect profile. You either come from the technology, or you come from the business process, but you have to pick up both, which makes the role so difficult. If you only come from technology, you’re basically a technology architect, so to speak, and otherwise you're a solution architect. The EA is supposed to play both roles; inherently, you have to have implementation experience, industry experience, domain experience, and so on.
That’s why it is an evolution of many other roles, I would say. When I was in IT myself, I would see that both technical architects and solution architects, as a next step, would become enterprise architects and take on a broader lens. It’s a career opportunity inside of SAP, but also for all of our customers. And that is a very good thing, from my perspective.
It’s important to create connectivity from business process capability through application coverage, mapping solution capabilities all the way to data. If you want to drive a truly transformational effort, you have to have that role internally, as a customer; otherwise, it’s only a technical move to renovate your IT infrastructure. This is a pivotal role. And now with SAP also providing also EAs to RISE customers, it’s reaching out our hand to customers and saying, “Let’s map this out and drive this together.”
To be embedded into a company’s business processes, to understand its challenges and priorities that closely, also gives the enterprise architect a unique vantage point to assess which solutions, SAP and otherwise, could be legitimately transformative for a business, as opposed to a sales representative positioned externally.
Yes, and the tooling has matured so much. Historically, you didn’t even have visibility of what our customers were running in their enterprise architecture. It’s important to capture this information centrally with a tool like LeanIX on the process side. Companies are seeing the value of these tools, which help them in their planning to establish a continuous improvement process. Often, things can become stuck after an implementation or upgrade; everybody’s hands-off, and you don’t move for another three years, and that’s not a good model to be in.
Even in a hybrid landscape, you can emulate that continuous adoption approach you’re forced to have the SaaS world, but that’s only possible if you have a handle on it, so you don’t always have to start from scratch. Upgradability is also a core responsibility of those enterprise architects. By the way, at SAP, we also have this information gathering in the pre-sales space, and there’s a clear handover process to the EA that comes in post-sales to help customers drive their transformations, so that nothing gets lost. What we’ve seen in the past, in pre-sales, is that we work closely with customers and have all this information, but then it’s not exchanged, and an SI has to start over. We’ve been working to close this loop between pre-sales and post-sales.
Read analyst Joshua Greenbaum's analysis of the growing impact of enterprise architects in the SAP ecosystem here.
SAP recently integrated AI capabilities with Joule into RISE with SAP. Can you discuss the decision to give all RISE customers access to Joule, across both packages? What excites you about bringing generative AI together with cloud ERP?
In terms of what’s actually real, the clear value that I see is on the user experience side. Given the breadth of our portfolio on the ERP side, it’s been a struggle to unify it all into a modern UI experience. Joule, our digital assistant, can help end-users by becoming the single interface they need. Typically, you look to an ERP system for insights and information, and sometimes you want to trigger certain actions, such as approvals or order creations—which is fairly doable when the system has a certain level of intelligence. That’s what we’re focusing on ensuring for both public and private editions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Joule should be able to answer all questions about the solution itself and how to use it, and how to find information within the solution or perform certain transactions. That’s progressing well. In the private cloud, Joule provides a second delivery track for customers to receive innovation without having to upgrade; we can bring innovations to older releases in the private cloud and connect Joule to ship the content, because Joule sits on top of SAP BTP. That’s absolutely real.
We’re also providing Joule consulting and developer capabilities, to help them implement our solutions and help them develop code. That will be a game-changer. All the legacy code that customers come with could be refactored in a much more efficient way, via Joule. And the ABAP capabilities for Joule, as well, are developing at an exciting pace. We see more efficiency in our own development, and customers will see that as well when they build extensions in a project context.
Agentic AI is next, and that will help users streamline work; instead of clicking 10 times in various Fiori apps, you tell the digital assistant to do it, and agents take on the work. We’ve seen demonstrations of this already in dispute management, where the system can already act autonomously to do a lot for an end-user. I believe this will develop more in the coming year.
In the enterprise world, though, reliability is very important. Being able to understand why certain recommendations were given, why certain steps should be taken, where the source of the recommendation exists… these are what we considered from the very beginning when we talked about business AI, and that is that what needs to grow over time, in terms of trust.
If you trigger certain purchase orders or even a manufacturing process based on what AI tells you, you have to be pretty sure that it's completely right, or this can have significant impact. As we talk about mission-critical processes, it really has to do with trust. But the technology is evolving so quickly, and what the hype does is that customers are extremely willing to adopt and to try things out. We have no problem finding customers to work with us in early validation of use cases, provide that data, and collaborate on development. It's super motivating for the developers here at SAP.
Data is the foundation of cloud ERP, and transitioning to this environment promises to enhance real-time data access for SAP customers. As generative AI sweeps the enterprise landscape, data quality and governance are non-negotiable priorities for those customers seeking to apply generative AI in a business context. What progress did you see in terms of customers’ data strategies and their evolutions this past year, and what pain points or priority areas remain as we head into 2025?
Recognizing that data potentially holds great value is nothing new; people have been using lines like “the new oil” for many years. But really harnessing the value of that data? That’s the game-changer. SAP Datasphere plays a key role here, offering an open data ecosystem and allowing the harmonization of heterogeneous data into a business-focused semantic model, creating deep connections between data, metadata, and business processes. This not only boosts the efficacy of machine learning and large language models but also supports real-time insights and decision-making across SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
SAP cloud ERP integrates end-to-end processes across lines of business, leveraging harmonized data with consistent quality and governance. Customers benefit from seamless integration scenarios that expand across the SAP product portfolio, supported by SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which enhances operations and fosters innovation. And yes, generative AI is like a supercharger — it doesn’t just allow end users to save time through automation of simple tasks. Instead, it completely changes how users interact with the system; our digital co-pilot Joule essentially becomes the new user experience. We’re also careful to ensure we don’t just add AI to existing functionality but that we take the time to consider how the process should be with AI, to rethink the entire interaction. This results in smarter, more agile operations, personalized user experiences, and automated decision-making, ultimately increasing productivity and innovation.
I believe we’re approaching a tipping point for many businesses. Many will have started the year with a vague sense of what might be possible and an appetite to embrace the change, but I believe—and I hear this from many of the customers I speak to in my daily work—that their view of the future is becoming significantly clearer, as is their desire to be ahead of the curve. And this is where GROW with SAP and RISE with SAP play such an important role. Neither is just a software product. Both are complete offerings that combine applications with services and methodologies. Both are designed to enable businesses to transform their businesses and leverage all that a cloud ERP has to offer.
SAP offers what I believe to be a unique combination. Backed by decades of process expertise and the richest business data available, SAP empowers customers to focus on what truly matters: driving growth and innovation. We remain committed to helping companies to meet today’s demands but also to thrive in the face of future uncertainties. We believe in a future where technology serves as a true partner in building stronger, more agile organizations.