Author: Peter M. Färbinger, E3-Magazin

What to do with SAP licenses that are no longer needed and only generate maintenance fees? If company shares are sold or staff have to be laid off, there may often be too many licenses downstream. However, unused licenses cause high support costs and maintenance fees.

The SAP community is increasingly diverging from SAP's plans. There is a wide gap between the global ERP market leader's dreams and reality.

SAP left the path of righteousness many years ago. It began with the hybridization of its database. Added value? Unknown. Many other construction sites were added, partly out of ignorance and partly due to competitive pressure. Unfortunately, between topics such as the cloud and AI, SAP has yet to find its way again.

The topic of AI naturally also dominates the SAP community, that is well known: However, an offer analysis of the 180 SAP partners at the DSAG Annual Congress 2025 Bremen shows that AI hardly realizes any relevant added value in productive ERP systems such as Business Suite 7 or S/4 Hana.

An ERP system from SAP provides an excellent opportunity for consultants, IT experts, and competitors to earn money. It's only logical that SAP would have its own set of rules for this. What does Celonis want from SAP?

The legendary saying, "Red Bull gives you wings," is probably familiar to most people. However, things are not going well for the beverage company in soccer and Formula 1 right now. The sports press writes: "Red Bull is taking a beating."

For ten years, SAP has struggled to motivate its customers to switch to S/4 and the cloud, whether private or public. SAP Executive Board Member Thomas Saueressig presented a successful customer evolution that obviously only works on a Greenfield site.

With customs barriers, trade barriers, and wars, the world is being atomized and defragmented by autocrats. Fortunately, we have a global SAP community with a website in German, English, Spanish, and now, French.

Now the release change from ECC/ERP 6.0 to S/4 Hana may last until 2033. The repeated extension of the current ERP conversion process indicates a lack of planning. SAP no longer understands the ERP market, inventing new transformation scenarios every few years.

Future-proofing is a key issue for existing SAP customers. Due to accelerated digitalization, S/4 conversion, AI, cloud and growing IT complexity, knowledge about their own SAP ERP is becoming increasingly important.

In the future, standard business software will be orchestrated on IT platforms and determined by AI and cloud computing. AI agents will probably control the company's organizational structure and processes.

FUE (Full Use Equivalent) is a licensing metric from SAP. This raises the question: how much FUE is attributable to an AI agent? The German AI company DeepL presented an agent-based AI that can also access SAP S/4 Hana via standard interfaces such as a browser, keyboard, and mouse.