SAP as the engine of the cloud market - hopefully soon!

In a recent survey of its members by the German-speaking SAP User Association (DSAG), only five percent said they were currently focusing their investments on S/4 Hana.

Many will probably continue to operate their current SAP system, partly because of SAP's assurance that it will provide support for SAP ERP/ECC6 until the end of 2025.

But nine years are quickly over. If skepticism is still high when it comes to the classic SAP S/4 Hana topics, what is the situation like with the Hana cloud products?

Around 80 percent of DSAG members rate the strategic importance of the Cloud Edition of S/4 Hana as low.

Of course, one could argue that the classic SAP user tends to be conservative or that skepticism in German-speaking countries is greater than in other countries of the world with regard to the cloud model and its aspects of data protection and data security. But if SAP has issued the strategic direction of wanting to transform itself into a cloud provider and is definitely also investing high development capacities in the Cloud Edition, it is baffling that it is not possible to get more users excited about the cloud model, especially because it would also minimize the challenge of hardware investment.

$500 million in revenue?

SAP provides an ROI calculator for the Hana cloud platform on the web. You are asked to enter some data, such as the annual revenue generated by your company.

The default value is 500 million US dollars (which can of course be overwritten). Is this just a number that has been used? Or is this a subtle indication of the clientele that SAP wants for its cloud applications, i.e. from 500 million upwards?

According to the definition of the KfW banking group - sales of up to 500 million euros - this would almost exclude small and medium-sized enterprises (disregarding the dollar/euro conversion here).

So is one of the reasons for the lack of acceptance of the cloud offering possibly also the positioning?

We, Esker, are a provider of cloud solutions for automating document processes in the SAP environment. For 10 years, we have been steadily expanding our cloud portfolio, and our company now generates around 70 percent of its revenue from cloud applications.

For us and our customers, cloud has become part of everyday life, partly because acceptance of cloud has changed in recent years: Whereas five or six years ago we were still frequently met with complete rejection from interested parties (keywords: data protection and data security), we now hardly ever experience this rejection.

The issues of data protection and data security, while still extremely important, have given way in priority to questions of performance, SLAs, down and update times, etc.

As a cloud provider, we would of course like SAP to pick up on this momentum that certainly exists in the market and give the topic new and further impetus.

On the one hand, we see it quite selfishly, because it benefits us as a provider when the decisive and influential key player further increases the acceptance of cloud offerings. But we also see it as an opportunity for SAP users because we believe in the cloud model and because it has become a model of success, at least for us and many of our customers.

Can SAP become the engine for the cloud market? I wish so, the faster the better!