E3 Category: Editor-in-Chief Blog

The SAP community is still interested in innovation, AI and digital transformation, but SAP is less and less the "preferred vendor". The DSAG Innovation Report 2025 shows a lasting skepticism towards the global ERP market leader.

The U.S. stock markets are tumbling. Investors are attempting to sell and flee to Europe with their capital, and yet SAP cannot benefit from this. The magic of cloud, Datasphere, and AI has evaporated. The true value of SAP is being revealed.

Deals" are currently the order of the day and SAP's clean-core requirement is a deal with its own existing customers and partners. SAP demands a lot from its own community in return for planning security.

In many cases, SAP's licensing policy seems counterproductive. Innovation comes from experimentation, learning, and experience. For proof-of-concepts, SAP customers need a test environment that runs without a license.

In recent years, the SAP universe has been atomized. The consistent R/3 black box has become a heterogeneous conglomerate of ERP modules and cloud applications. From blockchain to IoT: SAP seemed to have to follow every IT trend. Today, AI chaos rules the SAP world.

With a complex ERP initiative for a hidden maintenance extension and an alternative cloud roadmap, RISE with SAP should have been given a second chance at survival earlier this year. The announcement of the Business Data Cloud in addition to the Business Technology Platform has finally put S/4 out of business.

SAP recognized the value and importance of data early on, but failed to develop a stable solution across multiple ERP generations. From NetWeaver to Datasphere, there have been ambitious attempts, but no data orchestration in the ERP space.

In an interview with Handelsblatt editor Christof Kerkmann at the WEF 2025 in Davos, SAP Executive Board member Thomas Saueressig modified the popular saying “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” Saueressig said: "You shape your own future.”

Members of the SAP community were surprised to read an announcement in the German business magazine Handelsblatt this week, which stated that there could be an ECC maintenance extension until 2033. If an adapted RISE with SAP contract is signed, SoH should be possible for several more years.

"Hello World" was programmed by SAP employee Raja Gupta in numerous programming languages and frameworks on SAP BTP to demonstrate the openness and flexibility of this platform (see community.sap.com). The SAP Cloud Application Programming Model will also be discussed at the Steampunk and BTP Summit 2025 in Heidelberg, Germany.

ChatGPT from OpenAI is capable of providing rapid responses to a wide range of inquiries; however, it should be noted that the accuracy of these responses may not always be guaranteed. Specialized AI systems can be beneficial tools, as demonstrated by our experiment with a Google system based on the multimodal chatbot Gemini 1.5, which was fed four years’ worth of E3 Magazine’s articles.

A typical RISE with SAP contract is an agreement to provide full disclosure to the ERP market leader. Following a RISE conversion, the SAP customer has almost only obligations and hardly any rights. Will the EU provide assistance with the implementation of the Data Service Act?