My buddy Jeff recently sent me an article talking about SAP.
The general gist of the article is that SAP is struggling because it’s having issues getting customers into the new subscription model and the new HANA/S4 versions. I found this both interesting, and not surprising. I’d be curious to hear others take on this, but of the sampling of customers I know, HANA, S4 and the cloud are all things that many customers just don’t see the need for. Now, don’t get me wrong, everyone likes things to be fast, and everyone wants to be the coolest new platform. The problem is that is that the price tag of all new hardware, all new software, and potential ramp up of new skills due to changes in S/4 have a lot of customers hesitating to make the switch.
First off, look at the hardware. When you switch to HANA, you either need to look at going to an entirely cloud based model, like SalesForce.com or RAMCO. The problem is that SAP is still unproven in the cloud arena. It’s hard to stay say if the fear is warranted, but at this point, Salesforce has been doing this for a long time… SAP is trying to jump into the game, perhaps very late. So that means if you don’t feel comfortable offloading your ERP to the cloud, you need to pretty much replace all your hardware to switch from HDD to RAM. No small price tag associated with that.
Now if you look at the benefits, you get all the faster analysis, faster runtime on DB access, and possibly some new functionality… but it’s been hard to see much of S/4. Regardless, it’s a new learning curve for your basis person… and it may be all new for your business if you start moving toward all FIORI which is cool and possibly better, but it’s still new. That means you need a budget for change management now too. At the end of the day, many manufacturing companies just don’t see the need for it. It’s useful in the BI world, but for the general ERP, it’s just not cost effective for many industries.
Now, I’m sure that SAP will force this customers to change at some point… or at least make it “an offer they can’t refuse”, but in the meantime, many companies are look to continue business as usual.
Thoughts???
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike