Few at SAP are bet­ter-qual­i­fied to speak to the evo­lu­tion of the company’s cloud ERP port­fo­lio than Jan Gilg, Pres­i­dent and Chief Prod­uct Offi­cer, Cloud ERP.

An 18-year vet­er­an of SAP, Gilg has served as Glob­al Head of Enter­prise Archi­tec­ture, Glob­al Head of IT Busi­ness Ser­vices, and SVP & Head of SAP S/4HANA. That last posi­tion, which Gilg start­ed at the begin­ning of 2019, expand­ed a year lat­er to encom­pass SAP’s dig­i­tal sup­ply chain port­fo­lio, lead­ing to his cur­rent role, in which he’s respon­si­ble for dig­i­tal sup­ply chain and SAP’s cloud ERP.

As adop­tion of cloud ERP solu­tions con­tin­ues to accel­er­ate in the SAP com­mu­ni­ty, ahead of main­te­nance dead­lines that start to take effect at the end of next year, SAP is focused on pro­vid­ing its cus­tomers with tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vices to facil­i­tate mov­ing mis­sion-crit­i­cal ERP process­es to the cloud. In recog­ni­tion of this push, SAP was recent­ly named a leader in Gart­ner’s Mag­ic Quad­rant for Cloud ERP for Prod­uct-Cen­tric and Ser­vice-Cen­tric Enter­pris­es for the third con­sec­u­tive year.

In the sec­ond half of a wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion, the first half of which you can read here, Gilg recent­ly dis­cussed the evo­lu­tion of the enter­prise archi­tect role in the SAP ecosys­tem and the poten­tial of gen­er­a­tive AI to trans­form the ERP landscape.

This inter­view has been edit­ed and condensed.

One of the key RISE updates of the year, from our per­spec­tive, is the addi­tion of enter­prise archi­tects for RISE cus­tomers, as announced at SAP Sap­phire. What can you share about recent progress on that front? 

This is a top­ic I’m pas­sion­ate about. I used to be an enter­prise archi­tect myself — how­ev­er you define that role, which was even a strug­gle back in the on-premis­es days. Even then, though, an enter­prise archi­tect was need­ed, and that’s only become more the case as cus­tomers become larg­er and more com­plex, as their land­scapes become more complex. 

We look at EAs now as becom­ing the CTO for the cus­tomer, right? We’re tak­ing over the IT land­scape, and we’ve broad­ened our lens much more; it’s not only about mov­ing ECC but about mov­ing your entire land­scape, which con­sists of the SAP Busi­ness Suite, with SAP Advanced Plan­ning and Opti­miza­tion (APO), with SAP Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM), with SAP Sup­pli­er Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (SRM), and so on.

Every­thing even­tu­al­ly needs to move into the cloud, and the EA is exact­ly the per­son that helps to map that out, lever­ag­ing the tool­ing that we pro­vide as part of RISE, such as SAP Sig­navio for the busi­ness process side, to doc­u­ment the enter­prise archi­tec­ture and data flows. It’s clear that the cloud offers a very supe­ri­or mod­el for com­pa­nies to run their IT infra­struc­ture, but the price of this is always inte­gra­tion, as we ship more capa­bil­i­ties as SaaS com­po­nents. That’s also true in the pri­vate cloud, on SAP BTP; if you look at Joule, our dig­i­tal assis­tant, at our AI cas­es, new inno­va­tions come on BTP. Cus­tomers expect that they fit and work seam­less­ly togeth­er; the EA ensures this while keep­ing an eye on the imple­men­ta­tion side, when it comes to the clean core. They’re look­ing at the dash­board, work­ing with the imple­men­ta­tion part­ner, hold­ing them account­able, guid­ing them on our clean-core guide­line and strategies.

There’s pres­sure on our side to find enough peo­ple to do that. Cer­tain­ly, the com­plex­i­ty varies depend­ing on the size of the cus­tomer; BMW, for instance, has a full-time enter­prise archi­tect, where­as mul­ti­ple cus­tomers that are small­er can be served by one EA. We are ramp­ing up heav­i­ly in our ser­vices orga­ni­za­tion and reskilling peo­ple into that role, which also shows that the role of our ser­vices orga­ni­za­tion is chang­ing. It’s not about the project time­line but about help­ing our cus­tomers to adopt our solu­tions, which is part of the val­ue propo­si­tion in the cloud. Oth­er­wise, it does­n’t work. We’re trans­form­ing our ser­vices func­tion toward that. The goal here is not sim­ply to opti­mize the project imple­men­ta­tion time­line, but to help cus­tomers to adopt and to keep our ecosys­tem in line with our strat­e­gy. That’s a core ele­ment of our RISE offering. 

Read ASUG­’s recap of keynote stage announce­ments made at SAP Sap­phire & ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence in 2024.

Are you see­ing more IT pro­fes­sion­als serve as these EAs, or are pro­fes­sion­als on the busi­ness side equal­ly well-suit­ed to fit into that role? What are the skills that allow EAs to succeed?

That’s such an inter­est­ing ques­tion, and it’s been around as long as the role of the enter­prise archi­tect has been around. You can cer­tain­ly approach it from both sides. I’ve seen both hap­pen, and I think both sce­nar­ios are need­ed. I almost look at it as a pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary focus of an enter­prise archi­tect pro­file. You either come from the tech­nol­o­gy, or you come from the busi­ness process, but you have to pick up both, which makes the role so dif­fi­cult. If you only come from tech­nol­o­gy, you’re basi­cal­ly a tech­nol­o­gy archi­tect, so to speak, and oth­er­wise you’re a solu­tion archi­tect. The EA is sup­posed to play both roles; inher­ent­ly, you have to have imple­men­ta­tion expe­ri­ence, indus­try expe­ri­ence, domain expe­ri­ence, and so on. 

That’s why it is an evo­lu­tion of many oth­er roles, I would say. When I was in IT myself, I would see that both tech­ni­cal archi­tects and solu­tion archi­tects, as a next step, would become enter­prise archi­tects and take on a broad­er lens. It’s a career oppor­tu­ni­ty inside of SAP, but also for all of our cus­tomers. And that is a very good thing, from my perspective. 

It’s impor­tant to cre­ate con­nec­tiv­i­ty from busi­ness process capa­bil­i­ty through appli­ca­tion cov­er­age, map­ping solu­tion capa­bil­i­ties all the way to data. If you want to dri­ve a tru­ly trans­for­ma­tion­al effort, you have to have that role inter­nal­ly, as a cus­tomer; oth­er­wise, it’s only a tech­ni­cal move to ren­o­vate your IT infra­struc­ture. This is a piv­otal role. And now with SAP also pro­vid­ing also EAs to RISE cus­tomers, it’s reach­ing out our hand to cus­tomers and say­ing, ​“Let’s map this out and dri­ve this together.” 

To be embed­ded into a company’s busi­ness process­es, to under­stand its chal­lenges and pri­or­i­ties that close­ly, also gives the enter­prise archi­tect a unique van­tage point to assess which solu­tions, SAP and oth­er­wise, could be legit­i­mate­ly trans­for­ma­tive for a busi­ness, as opposed to a sales rep­re­sen­ta­tive posi­tioned externally.

Yes, and the tool­ing has matured so much. His­tor­i­cal­ly, you didn’t even have vis­i­bil­i­ty of what our cus­tomers were run­ning in their enter­prise archi­tec­ture. It’s impor­tant to cap­ture this infor­ma­tion cen­tral­ly with a tool like LeanIX on the process side. Com­pa­nies are see­ing the val­ue of these tools, which help them in their plan­ning to estab­lish a con­tin­u­ous improve­ment process. Often, things can become stuck after an imple­men­ta­tion or upgrade; everybody’s hands-off, and you don’t move for anoth­er three years, and that’s not a good mod­el to be in. 

Even in a hybrid land­scape, you can emu­late that con­tin­u­ous adop­tion approach you’re forced to have the SaaS world, but that’s only pos­si­ble if you have a han­dle on it, so you don’t always have to start from scratch. Upgrad­abil­i­ty is also a core respon­si­bil­i­ty of those enter­prise archi­tects. By the way, at SAP, we also have this infor­ma­tion gath­er­ing in the pre-sales space, and there’s a clear han­dover process to the EA that comes in post-sales to help cus­tomers dri­ve their trans­for­ma­tions, so that noth­ing gets lost. What we’ve seen in the past, in pre-sales, is that we work close­ly with cus­tomers and have all this infor­ma­tion, but then it’s not exchanged, and an SI has to start over. We’ve been work­ing to close this loop between pre-sales and post-sales.

Read ana­lyst Joshua Green­baum’s analy­sis of the grow­ing impact of enter­prise archi­tects in the SAP ecosys­tem here.

SAP recent­ly inte­grat­ed AI capa­bil­i­ties with Joule into RISE with SAP. Can you dis­cuss the deci­sion to give all RISE cus­tomers access to Joule, across both pack­ages? What excites you about bring­ing gen­er­a­tive AI togeth­er with cloud ERP?

In terms of what’s actu­al­ly real, the clear val­ue that I see is on the user expe­ri­ence side. Giv­en the breadth of our port­fo­lio on the ERP side, it’s been a strug­gle to uni­fy it all into a mod­ern UI expe­ri­ence. Joule, our dig­i­tal assis­tant, can help end-users by becom­ing the sin­gle inter­face they need. Typ­i­cal­ly, you look to an ERP sys­tem for insights and infor­ma­tion, and some­times you want to trig­ger cer­tain actions, such as approvals or order cre­ations — which is fair­ly doable when the sys­tem has a cer­tain lev­el of intel­li­gence. That’s what we’re focus­ing on ensur­ing for both pub­lic and pri­vate edi­tions of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. 

Joule should be able to answer all ques­tions about the solu­tion itself and how to use it, and how to find infor­ma­tion with­in the solu­tion or per­form cer­tain trans­ac­tions. That’s pro­gress­ing well. In the pri­vate cloud, Joule pro­vides a sec­ond deliv­ery track for cus­tomers to receive inno­va­tion with­out hav­ing to upgrade; we can bring inno­va­tions to old­er releas­es in the pri­vate cloud and con­nect Joule to ship the con­tent, because Joule sits on top of SAP BTP. That’s absolute­ly real.

We’re also pro­vid­ing Joule con­sult­ing and devel­op­er capa­bil­i­ties, to help them imple­ment our solu­tions and help them devel­op code. That will be a game-chang­er. All the lega­cy code that cus­tomers come with could be refac­tored in a much more effi­cient way, via Joule. And the ABAP capa­bil­i­ties for Joule, as well, are devel­op­ing at an excit­ing pace. We see more effi­cien­cy in our own devel­op­ment, and cus­tomers will see that as well when they build exten­sions in a project context.

Agen­tic AI is next, and that will help users stream­line work; instead of click­ing 10 times in var­i­ous Fiori apps, you tell the dig­i­tal assis­tant to do it, and agents take on the work. We’ve seen demon­stra­tions of this already in dis­pute man­age­ment, where the sys­tem can already act autonomous­ly to do a lot for an end-user. I believe this will devel­op more in the com­ing year. 

In the enter­prise world, though, reli­a­bil­i­ty is very impor­tant. Being able to under­stand why cer­tain rec­om­men­da­tions were giv­en, why cer­tain steps should be tak­en, where the source of the rec­om­men­da­tion exists… these are what we con­sid­ered from the very begin­ning when we talked about busi­ness AI, and that is that what needs to grow over time, in terms of trust.

If you trig­ger cer­tain pur­chase orders or even a man­u­fac­tur­ing process based on what AI tells you, you have to be pret­ty sure that it’s com­plete­ly right, or this can have sig­nif­i­cant impact. As we talk about mis­sion-crit­i­cal process­es, it real­ly has to do with trust. But the tech­nol­o­gy is evolv­ing so quick­ly, and what the hype does is that cus­tomers are extreme­ly will­ing to adopt and to try things out. We have no prob­lem find­ing cus­tomers to work with us in ear­ly val­i­da­tion of use cas­es, pro­vide that data, and col­lab­o­rate on devel­op­ment. It’s super moti­vat­ing for the devel­op­ers here at SAP.

Data is the foun­da­tion of cloud ERP, and tran­si­tion­ing to this envi­ron­ment promis­es to enhance real-time data access for SAP cus­tomers. As gen­er­a­tive AI sweeps the enter­prise land­scape, data qual­i­ty and gov­er­nance are non-nego­tiable pri­or­i­ties for those cus­tomers seek­ing to apply gen­er­a­tive AI in a busi­ness con­text. What progress did you see in terms of cus­tomers’ data strate­gies and their evo­lu­tions this past year, and what pain points or pri­or­i­ty areas remain as we head into 2025?

Rec­og­niz­ing that data poten­tial­ly holds great val­ue is noth­ing new; peo­ple have been using lines like ​“the new oil” for many years. But real­ly har­ness­ing the val­ue of that data? That’s the game-chang­er. SAP Data­s­phere plays a key role here, offer­ing an open data ecosys­tem and allow­ing the har­mo­niza­tion of het­ero­ge­neous data into a busi­ness-focused seman­tic mod­el, cre­at­ing deep con­nec­tions between data, meta­da­ta, and busi­ness process­es. This not only boosts the effi­ca­cy of machine learn­ing and large lan­guage mod­els but also sup­ports real-time insights and deci­sion-mak­ing across SAP S/4HANA Cloud. 

SAP cloud ERP inte­grates end-to-end process­es across lines of busi­ness, lever­ag­ing har­mo­nized data with con­sis­tent qual­i­ty and gov­er­nance. Cus­tomers ben­e­fit from seam­less inte­gra­tion sce­nar­ios that expand across the SAP prod­uct port­fo­lio, sup­port­ed by SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), which enhances oper­a­tions and fos­ters inno­va­tion. And yes, gen­er­a­tive AI is like a super­charg­er — it doesn’t just allow end users to save time through automa­tion of sim­ple tasks. Instead, it com­plete­ly changes how users inter­act with the sys­tem; our dig­i­tal co-pilot Joule essen­tial­ly becomes the new user expe­ri­ence. We’re also care­ful to ensure we don’t just add AI to exist­ing func­tion­al­i­ty but that we take the time to con­sid­er how the process should be with AI, to rethink the entire inter­ac­tion. This results in smarter, more agile oper­a­tions, per­son­al­ized user expe­ri­ences, and auto­mat­ed deci­sion-mak­ing, ulti­mate­ly increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and innovation. 

I believe we’re approach­ing a tip­ping point for many busi­ness­es. Many will have start­ed the year with a vague sense of what might be pos­si­ble and an appetite to embrace the change, but I believe — and I hear this from many of the cus­tomers I speak to in my dai­ly work — that their view of the future is becom­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly clear­er, as is their desire to be ahead of the curve. And this is where GROW with SAP and RISE with SAP play such an impor­tant role. Nei­ther is just a soft­ware prod­uct. Both are com­plete offer­ings that com­bine appli­ca­tions with ser­vices and method­olo­gies. Both are designed to enable busi­ness­es to trans­form their busi­ness­es and lever­age all that a cloud ERP has to offer. 

SAP offers what I believe to be a unique com­bi­na­tion. Backed by decades of process exper­tise and the rich­est busi­ness data avail­able, SAP empow­ers cus­tomers to focus on what tru­ly mat­ters: dri­ving growth and inno­va­tion. We remain com­mit­ted to help­ing com­pa­nies to meet today’s demands but also to thrive in the face of future uncer­tain­ties. We believe in a future where tech­nol­o­gy serves as a true part­ner in build­ing stronger, more agile organizations.