E3-Roundtable: Generic ERP platforms (English)

While existing SAP customers are forced into an expensive straitjacket with the Business Technology Platform (BTP) and Business Data Cloud (BDC), which cement vendor lock-in, independent iPaaS solutions such as Boomi or hyperscalers demonstrate true agility. They orchestrate hybrid data streams as composable ERP without rigid ABAP constraints. Anyone seeking true digital sovereignty must critically question the golden SAP cage.

The era of the monolithic SAP ERP system, where the software giant from Walldorf held absolute sovereignty over business processes and data within the customer’s own data center, is irrevocably coming to an end. For decades, SAP existing customers have obediently followed the vendor’s roadmap, but the current push towards cloud-only deployment and the rigid Clean Core dogma forces a critical reassessment of our enterprise architecture. While SAP aggressively positions its Business Technology Platform (BTP) and the newly announced Business Data Cloud (BDC) as the ultimate panaceas for integration and artificial intelligence, a closer investigative look reveals a highly complex, fragmented, and commercially opaque ecosystem fraught with severe vendor lock-in risks. Customers are being coerced into transforming their historically grown, competitively differentiating ABAP modifications into cloud-native extensions via Steampunk, CAP, or RAP on the BTP, paying for consumption-based metrics that often explode unpredictably in productive operations. In response to this looming dependency, an alternative paradigm is gaining massive traction within the critical SAP community: the Composable ERP based on generic and independent IT platforms.