Since RISE with SAP was first announced ear­li­er this year, one of the main ques­tions SAP cus­tomers, part­ners, and prog­nos­ti­ca­tors have been ask­ing is what sort of trac­tion the solu­tion will have. Billed as ​“busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion as a ser­vice,” RISE with SAP rep­re­sents a con­cen­trat­ed effort by SAP to encour­age its cus­tomers to migrate to the cloud and adopt SAP S/4HANA, two actions the soft­ware com­pa­ny has made clear are at the cen­ter of its notion of the ​“intel­li­gent enter­prise” — and rep­re­sent the for­ward tra­jec­to­ry of SAP. 

Ear­li­er this week, ASUG and DSAG came togeth­er for a web­cast to dis­cuss the results of the research the two orga­ni­za­tions con­duct­ed in April, four months after RISE with SAP was unveiled and made avail­able to SAP cus­tomers. Con­sist­ing of 443 total respon­dents from across North Amer­i­ca and Ger­many, the sur­vey focused on SAP cus­tomers’ atti­tudes on cloud adop­tion, SAP S/4HANA, and RISE with SAP. 

“This research col­lab­o­ra­tion with DSAG was incred­i­bly insight­ful,” said Maris­sa Gilbert, research direc­tor at ASUG. ​“It was great to work with DSAG to mea­sure the atti­tudes our two orga­ni­za­tions’ mem­bers have on cloud adop­tion and RISE with SAP, and under­stand the hur­dles and chal­lenges our mem­bers see when it comes to under­stand­ing the val­ue of these tools.” 

Here are three key high­lights from the research. 

The State of SAP S/4HANA

The best place to start is to exam­ine where ASUG and DSAG mem­bers are in their adop­tion of SAP S/4HANA. Dur­ing the Q2 earn­ings call a few weeks ago, SAP report­ed that over 17,000 cus­tomers are cur­rent­ly live on SAP S/4HANA. Accord­ing to the research con­duct­ed by ASUG and DSAG, over half of the orga­ni­za­tions sur­veyed are either live on SAP S/4HANA, are some­where in the process of their migra­tion, or have plans to move. 24 per­cent of both ASUG and DSAG respon­dents report­ed that they are cur­rent­ly live on the ERP plat­form, with 21 per­cent of ASUG and 20 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers in the process of mov­ing. 30 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 37 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers report­ed that they are plan­ning to move but haven’t start­ed. SAP cus­tomers are adopt­ing SAP S/4HANA or are seri­ous­ly con­sid­er­ing their move to the ERP plat­form. This is a pos­i­tive trend, espe­cial­ly when con­sid­er­ing that orga­ni­za­tions have until 2027 before SAP ceas­es sup­port­ing some of its lega­cy solu­tions includ­ing SAP ERP 6.0 and SAP Busi­ness Suite. 

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ASUG and DSAG also exam­ined the types of envi­ron­ments that their mem­bers are using. On the whole, DSAG mem­bers seem to be far wari­er of cloud envi­ron­ments than ASUG mem­bers. On-premis­es ecosys­tems still seem to be the most pop­u­lar, with 27 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 57 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers report­ing to still be using on-premis­es envi­ron­ments. When it comes to the cloud, 24 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 23 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers are on a pri­vate cloud envi­ron­ment, while 22 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and two per­cent of DSAG mem­bers are using a hybrid cloud mod­el. Only nine per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 6 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers report­ed using a pub­lic cloud environment. 

Atti­tudes on the Cloud 

Part of the research focused on respon­dents’ per­spec­tives on the cloud. On the whole, the two user groups’ atti­tudes on the cloud were pos­i­tive, with 74 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 46 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers indi­cat­ing they had extreme­ly pos­i­tive or some­what pos­i­tive per­cep­tions. Yet, DSAG mem­bers seem to be wari­er of cloud solu­tions than ASUG mem­bers. 26 per­cent of DSAG respon­dents have nei­ther pos­i­tive nor neg­a­tive feel­ings, while 27 per­cent report­ed hav­ing neg­a­tive feel­ings (com­pared to ASUG mem­bers, who report­ed 26 per­cent and three per­cent in the respec­tive categories.

“In my per­spec­tive, SAP comes from the on-prem world and our mem­bers have had a pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence from exact­ly these kinds of sys­tems,” Jens Hunger­shausen told atten­dees dur­ing the web­cast. He fur­ther not­ed that inte­gra­tion issues with cloud solu­tions and data and secu­ri­ty con­cerns have influ­enced this per­cep­tion of DSAG mem­bers. Geoff Scott, CEO of ASUG, not­ed that one fac­tor that may be influ­enc­ing the per­cep­tions of ASUG mem­bers is the sheer cost asso­ci­at­ed with set­ting up, main­tain­ing, and run­ning envi­ron­ments on servers and data centers. 

The research also asked atten­dees to detail the hur­dles they’ve had to over­comes when lever­ag­ing cloud solu­tions. Top­ping the list was licens­ing, with 41 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 72 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers list­ing it as a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge, fol­lowed by lack of in-house knowl­edge to han­dle a cloud solu­tion (41 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers, and 38 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers), and final­ly data pro­tec­tion and secu­ri­ty (25 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers, and 53 per­cent of DSAG members). 

The Per­cep­tions of RISE with SAP 

This col­lab­o­ra­tion between ASUG and DSAG also exam­ined the two user groups’ aware­ness and atti­tudes on RISE with SAP. Broad­ly speak­ing, the data indi­cates that many mem­bers are unaware or at least unfa­mil­iar with RISE with SAP and how the solu­tion can help their busi­ness­es. Over one-third (39 per­cent) of ASUG mem­bers said they’d nev­er even heard of RISE with SAP, com­pared with only 10 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers. 37 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 56 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers indi­cat­ed that they have heard of the sub­scrip­tion ser­vice but are not famil­iar with it. Only two per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and six per­cent of DSAG mem­bers said they were extreme­ly famil­iar with RISE with SAP. 

Scott encour­aged all atten­dees (and SAP cus­tomers) to at least take a look at the offer­ing and decide whether it is right for their busi­ness­es, not­ing that the bun­dled offer­ing of ser­vices like busi­ness process intel­li­gence and host­ing can have a sig­nif­i­cant impact on an organization’s tran­si­tion to the cloud. Respon­dents indi­cat­ed that they need­ed more infor­ma­tion on the notion of ​“busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion as a ser­vice” (41 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers, and 47 per­cent of DSAG mem­bers) along with the busi­ness process intel­li­gence offered as part of RISE with SAP (36 per­cent of ASUG mem­bers and 42 per­cent of DSAG members). 

Want to see the full break­down of the data from this ASUG and DSAG research? You can watch the entire web­cast on-demand here.