Unfortunately for SAP, major ERP upgrade projects are the last thing customers want to think about right now

SAP customers are hanging fire on major migrations and upgrades as the COVID-19 pandemic draws companies' attention away from their long-term enterprise application strategy, according to the Americas' SAP User Group (ASUG). During the second week of SAP's virtual Sapphire Now event and the concurrent user group online …

[arthoss]

the voice of reason

in the last couple of years customers have been trigger happy in increasing complexity that required costly and complicated integration between SAP and others.

Those who don't know history... are bound to repeat it. And that is what's been happening.

Happy to hear that customers realise that integration is key. For me, with 20plus years in the ERP consulting business, is so important that even at home integration is on the first place.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I can understand potential ERP customers' hesitance....

You've already got coronavirus going on, why incur a second malady at the same time! :)

[W.S.Gosset]

ERP

"ERP" always sounds like what it all too often turns out to be.

Eructation.

[logicalextreme]

Good

Maybe now they'll learn not to have a revenue model centred around hard-selling unsuitable monolithic crap and its latest rebrandings to decision makers who don't know what they're doing and causing untold suffering to everything they go near as a result; suffering that can only be relieved (and only partially, at that) by contracting somebody with the appropriate expensive SAP-specific qualifications.

Probably too much to hope that Covid kills them off entirely; they can always just sue some of their own customers in the event of a shortfall.

[Roland6]

Re: Good

>Maybe now they'll learn not to have...

The proof of that is whether SAP now have the toolset to enable customers to scaledown their SAP installations (ie. move from Enterprise to SME SAP) as they streamline/shrink their busines, or whether they are still better off going with the competition.

[logicalextreme]

Re: Good

In my experience they can certainly offer you some tools to come in and help you migrate to any SAP product from anything. The tools have pretty high day rates, though.

[Erik4872]

I wonder if we'll see Oracle-style shakedowns instead

If SAP can't get new customers, it's always possible they'll just turn the licensing screws on the existing ones. Not enough to require a full upgrade, mind you...just enough to tip customers over to "SAP Cloud" or similar, removing support for key features that just happen to be re-supported in the next version, etc.

It works for Oracle...they have all but made it impossible to buy one-off software. Our company is a heavy PeopleSoft user and basically got strongarmed into PeopleSoft Cloud -- they're only willing to do licenses if you're willing to pay shipping containers full of money. It makes their "cloud" business look good too -- win win for everyone but the customers!

[bombastic bob]

anaglyphic 3D "pause" pic on the main page

not bad. I was compelled to 'get my geek on' and wear the red/cyan glasses to view it.