Paul Cooper, the chairman of the UK and Ireland SAP User Group, discussed the breakdown in trust with SAP in his opening keynote at the Connect23 monthly conference.
During the company’s second quarterly earnings call, SAP CEO Christian Klein announced a change to its maintenance policy, which Cooper referred to as the” signature offering” of the business.
According to Klein, this change would enable customers to switch to the cloud while also transforming their business procedures. In reality, if customers used SAP Rise, the company’s cloud ERP offering, they would simply get sophisticated features like a new natural ledger for managing lasting supply chains and generativeAI.
Customers who are on-premises and held are, to put it mildly, disappointed with Christian Klein’s claim that SAP will only be releasing new innovations in the cloud, according to Cooper. This is not a tiny minority of clients. According to our most recent member survey, 79 % of those who have relocated to S/4 Hana have either an on-premises or hosted deployment. 70 % of those who plan to switch to S/4 Hana intend to do so on-premises or through hosted versions.
Cooper talked about a change in SAP’s plans. He continued by saying that customers would have a choice between cloud and on-premise deployments in 2020, according to SAP administrative board member Thomas Saueressig.
” We were informed that SAP thought there would be a cross future.” However, Mr. Saueressig never previously asserted that cloud deployments were fully innovative, in contrast to other S/4HANA flavors, Cooper continued.
Additionally, we were informed that S/4HANA would continue to be supported in 2040. Key innovations would only be made available to public and private cloud users using RISE or Grow, there were no restrictions on that. Why did n’t SAP inform us that new innovations would only be accessible to cloud-based users? Did they never consider it to be crucial to our decision-making process?
These are the inquiries made by our members. The more pessimistic among us have argued that SAP did n’t reveal this strategy earlier because customers who opted to remain on-premise may not have switched to S/4 Hana at all.
Cooper claimed that the situation was “innovative- less future” for businesses that continue to pay maintenance for sponsored or on-premises versions of S/4 Hana. Some people may decide to switch to various software maintenance contracts as a result, for as by working with an outside provider.
I’ve already heard on-premise and hosted customers say they anticipate seeing significant cost savings in support and maintenance because they are using a subpar version of S/4 Hana, he continued. I understand their argument: undoubtedly, a product with fewer features costs less to support and maintain. Others are enquiring as to whether SAP intends to fully or partially refund them because they are not offering the good or service they were promised.
Some seasoned SAP users are able to switch to the ERP company’s cloud-only offering. AstraZeneca is beginning a significant roll-out of S/4 Hana as part of the massive Axial business IT transformation program.
In order to achieve this, the business will combine three regional SAP warehouse management systems with seven SAP ECC ( Enterprise Core Components ) finance and manufacturing systems into a single SAP S/4 Hana coreERP.
We are certainly a Rise customer, said Russell Smith, vice president ERP transformation technology at AstraZeneca, during the Connect23 opening keynote session. SAP is not already available for us in regulated industries.
Ryan Poggi, the new managing director of SAP UK and Ireland, spoke about” the elephant in the room “—SAP’s cloud strategy, which is about making sure customers are not left behind—during the Connect23 opening presentation. Poggi discussed the conflict in Ukraine and different issues that businesses are currently dealing with in support of the strategy.
You expect us as a partner to go above and beyond the status quo when we simultaneously believe that we are falling short of our ability, he said.
But with limited resources, he emphasized that SAP needed to strike a balance between customer support and staying at the forefront of technological innovation, such as introducing conceptual AI, which, according to him, calls for cloud resources.
” My commitment is to keep communications open and honest.” He continued,” Our door is always open,” and urged delegates to speak openly with SAP in order to help build trust.
