The E3 Cover Story, a Critical Discourse on SAP

The current SAP cloud and licensing model in no way serves to technically and organizationally liberate existing customers, but rather binds them more closely to Walldorf. Those who rely on Rise with SAP without a sound IT strategy, external legal advice and license control risk high costs and permanent dependence on the software group.

Anyone who believes they can successfully implement an S/4 migration with the lift-and-shift concepts brownfield or greenfield is mistaken. Pure code conversion - even in SAP Clean Core - leads to strategic failure. Nova Intelligence relies on understanding instead of conversion: Cleanfield and Composable ERP for sustainable transformation.

The year 2026 marks a historic and critical turning point for the SAP community, where the glossy visions of the Walldorf-based software group SAP meet the pragmatic reality of existing customers with full force. The deadline for the end of maintenance of the old ERP system in 2027 is approaching, increasing the pressure on S/4 migrations and having a noticeable and lasting impact on the service provider market.

Data twilight in the ERP universe: The current geopolitical situation, the rocky road to S/4 transformation and the possible rescue through intelligent data management are making digital sovereignty increasingly explosive and relevant. Data sovereignty is key: only those who determine where data is stored and processed at all times can avoid vendor and legal lock-in.

The age of monolithic ERP, in which SAP controlled processes and data in the customer data center as the sole ruler, is coming to an irrevocable end. It is being replaced by a platform economy based around SAP BTP and Business Data Cloud. Composable ERP is the future.

Members of the SAP community from the R/2 and R/3 era have fond memories of the CCC. The Customer Competence Center provided first-level support to existing SAP customers through their own IT departments. Because SAP obviously considers everything that comes from a successful on-premise era to be „the devil's work,“ the CCC became the CCoE, or Customer Center of Expertise. An experiment!

Cloud computing was a much-discussed topic for a long time, then a standard, and thanks to hyperscalers, the cloud became a huge market with huge sales. Cloud computing is currently under discussion again and oscillates back and forth between sovereign, hybrid, private and public cloud. Which ERP architecture should the existing SAP customer choose? In the age of digital transformation, the decision on the future ERP architecture presents existing SAP customers with a complex dilemma that goes far beyond the simple choice between their own data center (on-prem) and the external cloud (private or public cloud). While the classic on-prem system dominated as the ERP standard including virtualization for a long time, the ideal of cloud technology has increasingly become the focus of the SAP community in recent years, with hybrid and sovereign models bringing specific challenges and risks that need to be mastered.

The activities of the 180 SAP partners in Bremen at the congress of the DSAG user association with over 5,000 participants were strikingly different from Viva Technology, an IT and AI event in Paris in the early summer of 2025. While the SAP community in German-speaking countries is still struggling with digital transformation and S/4 conversion, with the focus on topics such as monitoring, automation, IT platforms and data management, visitors to Paris were able to admire numerous operationally functioning AI applications from the global IT community and its customers. Even former SAP CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe was on the keynote stage in Paris as Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Siemens - there was no sign of SAP among the 180,000 participants. Is SAP once again missing out on a major IT trend?

SAP license management, once already a domain of complex rules and opaque metrics, has developed into an even denser jungle over the past three years, with many existing customers finding it difficult to keep track of the pathways. SAP's cloud strategy and the implementation of Full Use Equivalent as a new license model are at the heart of this development.