A survey of more than 230 SAP Business Suite licensees around the world by independent enterprise software provider Rimini Street has found that 85 per cent are not committed to SAP’s new S/4HANA platform, with 68 per cent citing lack of business case or unclear return on investment as the key reason.
Thirty-three per cent of respondents said they would not be migrating to, reimplementing and running SAP S/4HANA applications, and 52 per cent said they would “maybe” choose S/4HANA.
Other reasons given for not adopting the new platform are that is it an “unproven, early stage product” (44 per cent), and “higher migration and reimplementation costs” (36 per cent).
Seventy-two per cent of survey respondents stated that they are choosing to remain on their existing SAP ECC 6.0 platform, with only 3 per cent reporting they are currently using HANA.
The most common reason for not replacing these platforms was “current version meets business needs” (43 per cent), while others included “cost prohibitive to upgrade (37 per cent), and “move to new application later” (23 per cent).
The survey also revealed 75 per cent of those running ECC 6.0 are still on Enhancement Pack 6 or earlier releases, rather than the current Enhancement Pack 7. “Current version meets business needs” (72 per cent); “cost prohibitive to upgrade” (35 per cent); and “not enough new and valuable functionality” (30 per cent) were cited as the top three reasons for this.
“Rimini Street conducted this survey to better understand the primary application strategies of SAP licensees around the world,” said David Rowe, senior VP and chief marketing officer, Rimini Street (pictured).
“As SAP scrambles to try and show it is a relevant player in the cloud market with its S/4HANA product direction, this survey confirms that SAP licensees plan to continue driving significant value out of their long-running, stable and mature SAP applications that power the mission-critical business operations for tens of thousands of organisations around the world.”
To download a copy of the survey executive summary, please visit: www.riministreet.com/sapreport2015.
