But please with on-prem licenses

Shortly after the Sapphire, a briefing for financial analysts took place and a stronger increase in S/4 transformation projects was attested. After a decline in 2020, more existing SAP customers now seem ready to continue or start the release change - there is not much time left until 2027/2030.

What was also noted in the circle of financial analysts: SAP's existing customers are trying to keep their on-prem licenses! There may be two reasons for this: Many cloud providers including SAP coined the term BYOL (Bring Your Own License) and there is still no value SAP cloud exit strategy.

So if you want to maintain a safety net for a cloudless time, you'd better keep your licenses in the company vault. BYOL and the appropriate license management are currently the only insurance for an exit strategy. In the future, intelligent archiving solutions for S/4 may be offered that work on-prem, even if the SAP licenses are lost with the cancellation of the cloud subscription.

Such archives should last at least ten years and also enable evaluation and analysis based on the archive data. Until such archive solutions are available, the motto is: but with on-prem licenses, please.