Following a dozen years of cloud acquisitions, endless integrations, market upheavals, and mildly to wildly disruptive tech transitions, SAP rolls into SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference 2025 with a complete AI-ready portfolio capable of steering businesses in every industry through the strategic business transformations required in today's challenging global economy.
For SAP customers, this new level of preparedness within SAP is very welcome news because over the past few years, enterprise software has evolved from being an enabler of efficiency and productivity to being the intellectual and operational foundation of the always-on business world.
And while lots of very cool and very capable AI startups are doing some slick new things with that world-shaping technology, 53-year-old SAP has shown that it can innovate at startup speed while scaling its AI ambitions to meet the needs of approximately 500,000 customers around the globe.
That is the primary message for SAP customers as SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference 2025 is upon us: while these events over the past several years included a lot of updates along the lines of "we're working very hard on it and are making progress," this year's global get-together in Orlando will be marked by the availability—right here, right now—of wide-ranging solutions for customers' biggest problems:
- Migrating as many on-prem applications to the cloud as possible;
- Offering a single data store cutting across all SAP applications;
- Keeping pace with the latest AI technologies without locking customers in or out of their preferred approaches;
- Offering industry-specific solutions fully compatible with line of business (LOB) apps;
- Powering AI solutions with not only SAP data but also third-party data;
- Letting customers build on a single modern platform with great security;
- Allowing customers to pick and choose which apps to deploy and in what order;
- Sharing best practices for everything from cloud migrations to critical business processes; and
- Force-multiplying those SAP capabilities with a world-class ecosystem.
Four Catalysts for Business Transformation
At the heart of what SAP will be showing at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference are what I call the Four Catalysts for Business Transformation:
- Business Suite: formerly called Cloud ERP Suite, this includes many of SAP's core applications tied together elegantly in modular form on the …
- Business Technology Platform: which helps customer build, extend, automate, integrate, and analyze, thereby serving as the foundation for the company's …
- Business AI: which can optimize enterprise-wide processes with Joule agents to accelerate operations and drive better business outcomes by tapping into the unmatched breadth and depth of the …
- Business Data Cloud: which pulls together not only SAP's extraordinary volume of enterprise data across 25 industries and every conceivable enterprise process, but also third-party data via a powerful partnership with Databricks.
A Final Thought
SAP is riding into SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference with enormous customer demand and confidence as shown in the chart below, which lays out the growth rates for SAP and the major applications vendors. Customers today have a wide range of excellent vendors from which to choose—and, clearly, they're picking SAP more frequently than any of the other players.
Source: Cloud Wars analysis April 1, 2025