We’ve all heard SAP’s Run Simple mantra – but in the face of ever-increasing complexity and system landscapes often littered with a mash-up of solutions, can it really be achieved? While it’s an easy idea to propagate and marketing, it is not easy to operationalise in the face of this increasing complexity.
Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst, Constellation Research, in a keynote at the SAUG National Summit this week, set out six criteria that he believes are essential SAP satisfies in order to achieve this vision for its customers.
Firstly, ‘Run Simple’ can only work when SAP gets cloud to work.
“It can only work if SAP provides a SaaS offering that is good enough for you to move your business to that. My personal view is that SAP hasn’t arrived at that point yet,” Mueller said.
Another component for the Run Simple concept to become reality is if SAP can leverage economies of scale in the back-end.
“There are certain concerns for me there too because SAP has been acquiring a number of solutions from the outside which use different technologies, and leveraging the technology from SuccessFactors, Ariba and Concur, is not so easy as if they were built on the same platform,” Mueller said.
There are encouraging signs that SAP is moving to the same platform, he said, with an announcement of 2017 as the date for all SuccessFactors solutions to run on HANA.
Mueller also believes SAP need to be able to simplify the back-end sufficiently, and create competitive applications. The danger if applications are not competitive, customers will simply change from one subscription-based product to another, as has been seen in the CRM space with SugarCRM and Salesforce.
“Lastly, customers have to embrace public cloud. That’s a big gamble for them – it’s actually one of the biggest gambles SAP faces right now,” Mueller said.
He said with S/4 HANA running on public cloud and on-premise, but some offerings only available in the public cloud, SAP is basically banking on organisations being willing to embrace public cloud within the next three to four years.
