SAP bet the house on S/4HANA but most users aren't ready to move

As the UK and Ireland SAP User Group conference opened in Birmingham today, customers of the enterprise software monolith gave their verdict on the cloud-and-AI platform S/4HANA. Which can be summed up as: "Oh, you mean the thing we don't want to upgrade to yet?" How long are they going to wait? Of 467 user organisations …

[Harry Kiri]

"Only 8 per cent said the company was a trusted advisor;"

They'll learn.

[TeeCee]

Other news.

When asked any question about SAP, 42% of users cited "cost".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Other news.

Come on and be fair now, they could also be confused on licensing :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Other news.

True. SAP is the only company that is still selling licensed perpetual licenses, Windows 95 style.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Other news.

Give MS some credit here - they didn't send invoices with menaces if you didn't give sufficient notice that you wanted to cancel your maintenance renewal.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that no one asked for HANA. Not one customer ever said that they wanted a new DB for SAP... certainly not untested, limited HANA and certainly not a forced march. It was a money grab. They now have a DB which no one wants and no real SaaS strategy which everyone wants.

[MyffyW]

No, there is something worse

True nobody wanted HANA, but in fairness HANA is better than that other abomination SAP "recommend" .... Sybase

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No, there is something worse

HANA always seems like a theoretical project that was never meant to be released into production. A database that's also an application server - what were they thinking?

It's big, it's complicated, it's expensive. Everything that leads to failed projects.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Transactional partner"

"16 per cent said it was a transactional technology partner. "

I'm not sure if this is a swear word or not.

[Evil Auditor]

Re: "Transactional partner"

I admit that I do not understand what that means. Sure, I do have an idea what it might mean - more than one, actually (including some cynical ones).

[Anonymous Coward]

SAP Upgrade left thousands unpaid for months

A certain employer of mine acquired a bunch of US businesses; "merged" them, and rolled out SAP in place of the myriad of systems that had gone before. It was an extortionately expensive process; albeit one that needed to happen to reduce the duplication of systems and processes across multiple businesses. Not without pain; some staff were unpaid for months. Less said about what happened to supplier payments probably the better.

HANA is now being touted as the next step internally. I fear the reality is our overseers are plain terrified of moving anywhere else because of how expensive and what went wrong in the previous merger.

Reminds me of the tactics of selling cigarettes if you ask me. Something you can't live without, and the price goes up with no viable alternative :-P

[AndrewD375]

It's not called Sucks up All your Profits for nothing, you know.

[JRS]

Profitable

Even though your customers don't like or trust you, it doesn't mean you can't run a very large, highly profitable business.

Surely something wrong there?

[sketharaman]

Re: Profitable

LOL. On top of profits, I believe SAP's market cap has gone up 50% in the last 5 years.

[maxb]

Very true

My company had a very similar issues with pushy SAP sales team and their redicolous figures around S/4HANA. The funniest thing was the proposal of 100+ million on the implementation cost that ended nowhere. In fact it pissed off our executive team that much that our organisation is considering a move to Oracle SaaS ERP.

[AMBxx]

>> considering a move to Oracle SaaS ER

Out of the frying pan, into the fire?

[Il'Geller]

SAP gets the uniqueness of records as the uniqueness of rows and columns in a table.

AI gets the much better uniqueness by annotating them with texts.