The following guest perspective was authored by Joshua Greenbaum, Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC).
The fate of SAP and its customers has never been more closely tied to geopolitics than it is today. The on-going reconfiguring of global supply chains, the chaos surrounding tariffs, and the impact of global conflicts have become keynote stage fodder and agenda items in boardroom discussions across the global economy.
All this volatility has made our nerdy world of enterprise software a key player in minimizing the impacts—and maximizing the opportunities—that characterize the fallout from this never-ending turbulence. Whether the impacts are felt at a macro or micro-economic level, 2025 taught the SAP ecosystem that solving the problems companies and consumers face in today’s global economy increasingly starts with the transformation of enterprise software landscapes.
The need to navigate these macro/micro-economic impacts dovetailed neatly with the core of the strategic imperatives SAP laid out for customers in 2025, based on its SAP Business Data Cloud initiative, SAP’s increasingly robust applications roadmap, new developments in Joule and agentic AI, and changes to RISE and GROW.
SAP also began emphasizing in 2025 its willingness to allowing customers to deploy these solutions while taking into consideration the limits of companies’ technology landscapes and capabilities — a recognition that not all customers can move towards the cloud at an identical cadence. Customer choice and deployment excellence got a further boost as SAP’s business transformation toolchain—Cloud ALM, Signavio, LeanIX, and WalkMe—gained momentum in 2025 as the platform of choice for realizing this new deployment flexibility.
In 2025, one important refinement to SAP’s vision came in the form of what SAP executive board member Muhammad Alam characterized during his SAP Sapphire keynote as the “flywheel” effect: the specific competitive advantage SAP can provide through integration of data, applications, and AI across a full suite of applications. Alam, the board member tasked with leading product and engineering, further refined this concept, particularly around SAP’s “suite-first” message, by casting the opportunity SAP presents to customers as one defined by the ability to use the entire suite to achieve a single “global maximum” state of functionality. That optimized state, Alam emphasized, can’t be achieved using individual, best-of-breed solutions that only can optimize their respective line-of-business silos.
The sum of these and other initiatives helped position SAP, vis-à-vis the current global economic status quo, in a positive light. In customer presentations, and in conversations with customers at SAP and ASUG events over the course of 2025, it was clear that SAP has built a strong case for its ability to support the needs of customers to transform their businesses in ways that help them navigate this newfound complexity. Controlling costs, improving planning and visibility, aligning business outcomes, supporting business continuity — these were a few of the many themes that emerged from the SAP customer success stories of 2025.
These and other successes notwithstanding, the tens of thousands of customers still on the fence about how and when to start their transformation journey—whether from on-prem ECC systems or older S/4HANA systems—underscored how far many in the ecosystem still have to go. While SAP did a credible job in 2025 of showing how it can help customers transform, making transformation a strategic reality for the majority of customers in 2026 will require SAP to continue its efforts along five key domains:
- Implementation success. The stakes for implementation success have never been higher, and the cost of implementation failure, particularly during uncertain economic conditions, has only increased concomitantly. As such, SAP’s efforts to provide a unique set of tools and methods, centered around the business transformation toolchain, will become an even more essential component of customer success in 2026. Importantly, SAP will have to continue its efforts to more seamlessly integrate the different components of the toolchain around a common data architecture, an acknowledged goal for 2026.
- Pricing and contracting transparency. SAP’s growing support for customer choice in the design and deployment of hybrid landscapes means that pricing and contracting have become even more complex. Adding to this complexity is the issue of metering AI usage, particularly when using generative-AI tools like Joule. Customers have made it clear SAP must do a better job of bringing AI costs under control and in doing so help customers better predict costs and accurately budget for their use. SAP will also need to provide more clarity on how customers can continue to leverage older ECC and S/4HANA systems while still being able to deploy the latest functionality from SAP. General trends are positive, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to clarify how customers should plan their landscapes.
- Partner ecosystem evolution. Everything SAP wants to do in 2026 around its strategic initiatives will require a healthy, vigorous partner ecosystem. How well SAP succeeds in evolving its partner strategy to support the myriad partner domains—implementation, software development, industry and geographical specificity, among others—that are needed to fulfill its strategic ambitions will be an important bellwether for customer success in 2026.
- Industry-specific functionality. SAP has been doubling down on its industry-specific functionality, and 2026 promises a continuation of those efforts. These efforts will need to include greater clarity on where specific industry functionality can be deployed: There’s currently a fair amount of industry functionality in SAP S/4HANA Private Edition that hasn’t found its way to Public Edition, despite the latter’s role as the ultimate end state for business transformation in the relatively near future. SAP is dutifully closing this gap, but the fact remains that customers will need guidance on how to design their complex landscapes in order to best plan for the industry functionality they need today and in the future.
- Making the business case for business transformation. The success of the inaugural SAP Connect conference this past October highlighted a hunger in the SAP ecosystem for widespread business stakeholder engagement in the journey to the cloud. Bridging the business/IT gap with more events and content directed at bringing line-of-business stakeholders together with IT leadership will be an important focus for SAP in 2026.
All indications are that SAP understands the need to succeed along these domains. But these goals won’t be achieved through SAP’s efforts alone. There’s also a need for ASUG members to do their part, both in terms of keeping pressure on SAP to pursue these priorities as well as taking as much responsibility for their own success as possible. To this end, here are five goals ASUG members should strive for in 2026.
- Build out expertise across two key domains: Process excellence and implementation excellence. Process excellence requires a company-wide, silo-busting vision for how to leverage the opportunities presented by the global maximum vision articulated by Muhammad Alam. Even if your maxima aren’t exclusively drawn from SAP technology, getting your company to think across silos is essential for optimizing transformation success. Similarly, a focus on implementation excellence is necessary to ensure that process excellence is done the right way. The best way to do this is to build internal expertise around SAP’s business transformation toolchain. The toolchain’s full lifecycle approach to process discovery, implementation, and monitoring can ensure that your company is optimizing all your technology investments, not just the SAP ones. But toolchain excellence doesn’t come easily; there are lots of moving parts and mastering them needs to be a priority.
- Build competency around your partner engagement. All the strategic initiatives that will define SAP customer success in 2026 require a strong set of partners. This will likely include the full range of ecosystem partners: partners specializing in industries and micro-verticals; experts in critical line-of-business domains such as supply chain or finance; and partners who can help with risk and compliance management, in addition to implementation partners. While it’s possible that your implementation partner can play all those roles, chances are that the process and implementation excellence I mentioned above will need a broad range of partners in order to be successful.
- Engage your LOB stakeholders. Breaking down silos and striving for a global maximum effect can only work if your entire company is involved. That means bringing all lines of business into the transformation discussion. Even if a transformation project nominally covers a single line of business, it’s axiomatic that an individual LOB’s transformation cannot be optimized in a vacuum. Showing how the different LOBs can and should interact as part of every business transformation will be a fundamental challenge for 2026 that no company can afford to ignore.
- Make change management a best practice. Line-of-business engagement historically fails when a business transformation is attempted without business stakeholder engagement; and success is always proportional to the degree to which change management strategies are rigorously implemented. Learn to bake change management into every project, or else.
- Lean into your community. The beauty of the ASUG community is that it’s pretty much impossible to imagine that a problem your company encounters on the way to its business transformation hasn’t already been experienced—and potentially solved—by one of your peers. And if that problem persists nonetheless, the ASUG community is the perfect vector by which the problem can be brought to SAP’s attention. But the only way any of these things can happen is by engaging — either at the national level, in the different ASUG conferences held throughout the year, or at regional chapter events that take place with much greater frequency.
As one tumultuous year winds down, and another looms on the horizon, the one certainty is that the pace of change threatens to overwhelm any company trying to survive on the business technology strategies of the past. How new strategies can be executed is highly specific to the individual organization, but a common denominator for success can clearly be found by basing those strategies upon the rich, adaptable pallet of technology that SAP offers. Change will happen, whether your company is ready or not, and surviving and thriving despite that change will take more effort than ever before. The good news is that 2026 will present a unique set of opportunities for SAP customers to match their business needs to SAP’s solutions — provided they work to stay informed and engaged.
Joshua Greenbaum is Principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting (EAC).