SAP faces more accusations of breaching on-prem customers' trust SAP again stands accused of breaching trust with customers by a second user group following the decision to introduce innovations in its preferred cloud adoption models exclusively. Speaking for the UK and Ireland User group, chairman Paul Cooper said SAP faced a breakdown of trust with his members over SAP's choice to only …
While SAP's hosted cloud does lock you in and I can see why most people choosing SAP are going with private cloud or on-prem (which is the same thing in most cases these days anyway), what do you really get by using SAP's cloud solution?
I've just spent the last year on a big S/4 implementation and they are barely using anything old and mature, let alone anything modern and could have easily built their entire solution on a ten year old ECC system and achieved exactly the same result. All this fuss about new technology often ignores the fact that business move very slowly and aren't exactly keen on innovation, as that causes disruption and costs money.
Newer versions of SAP do have better connectors and extra features, but the core is the same and hardly changes at all, and the core is what most businesses want and only what most businesses need.
Having said that, some of the new cloud tools are considerably different and inferior to the classic namesake (e.g. Cloud PI vs classic PO/PI), so it's hardly surprising the companies are moving slowly and mostly towards the on-prem/own cloud solutions, where they have more control.
I'm not convinced by SAP's cloud, and clearly most business aren't, and while they are moaning about not getting the same innovation, to be fair it's not worth anything at the moment....
"Why did SAP not tell us that new innovation was only going to be available to cloud customers? Did they not think it was an important in our decision-making process?"
No, they knew it would be important in the decision making process, that's why they didn't tell you. Make no mistakes, this was all about keeping the money flowing while trying to lock people into SAP more and more.
Where exactly are any of SAP's customers going to go? There's Oracle and... yeah. And anyone who's paid even the tiniest bit of attention to what happened in Birmingham knows they'd probably be better off blowing the money on hookers and drugs, or literally burning it for heat.
While I'm sure in a decade or so a few uses for AI will have shaken out, it seems like right now 90% (and that's probably being generous) of examples of AI are just marketing BS. I mean, I saw a TOOTHBRUSH that claimed to have AI FFS. Microsoft, SAP, and pretty much everyone else hasn't really figured out what AI is and how to actually make it useful, but they're not letting that stop them from ramming it into every single product.
I think this is a reasonable approach from SAP. On-prem support until 2040 is golden. Look at Unit4 ERP and their announcement to stop on-prem support in December 2024 with just over a a year’s notice! You might not get the latest features with SAP, but you’ll receive security patches, etc.
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