SAP-Solution: HCM

SUSE is much more than just an SAP operating system provider: The company serves as a strategic anchor for Europe’s digital sovereignty. Faced with the pressure of SAP’s end-of-maintenance, forced migration to the cloud, and monopolization in the AI market, SUSE offers a reliable, technically mature solution.

The podcast for the E3 cover story is a supplement and continuation of the online texts from the E3 print magazine. A dialog between two AI avatars with knowledge from the German-speaking E3 editorial team provides an insight into the processes surrounding SAP and the SAP community. Translations into English, Spanish and French are provided by DeepL and Google.

The post-VMware era in the SAP landscape relies on KVM and can be combined with a robust private AI strategy platform. The Broadcom shock has had a profound impact. Virtualization is becoming a top-management issue.

Rising VMware costs and the desire for digital sovereignty forced the full-service IT provider FIS-ASP to rethink its approach. Through a phased migration to an open SUSE stack, the company significantly reduced its costs and created a future-proof infrastructure.

GenAI and Agentic AI are radically reshaping software and infrastructure stacks. However, the uncritical use of public AI for business-critical SAP data poses a massive business risk.

With the rapid spread of artificial intelligence in the workplace, a new gender gap is emerging: the Gender AI Gap. This is shown by a recent study by the IAB in collaboration with Initiative D21, a nonprofit network for the digital society.

SAP is supporting TCS's large-scale payroll transformation, thereby advancing its cloud-first strategy.

SAP promotes the Autonomous Enterprise as the next step in the evolution of digitalization. But with every decision delegated to AI agents, dependence on the underlying models grows. How autonomous do companies really become as a result, and who controls this autonomy?

Sapphire 2026 marks a strategic turning point. Instead of cloud migration, process harmonization, and S/4 HANA transformation, this year’s focus was on the „Autonomous Enterprise“—and thus on the question of how ERP landscapes will become smarter and more autonomous in the future.

„Cloud first“ is becoming „AI first“: SAP is evolving from an ERP system into a platform for AI-driven business processes. Many companies are still a long way from this. Bridge technologies already enable AI applications in on-premises SAP systems and pave the way to the cloud.

Why the future of AI in the SAP environment isn't just in the cloud—but right where people work today.

For more than two decades, SAP Concur has been pursuing a vision that was long considered ambitious, if not unrealistic: self-processing travel expense reimbursement.