SAP user group: S/4HANA usage is growing, but still in the minority

The German-speaking user group for enterprise software giant SAP says that customers’ willingness to invest in the company’s S/4HANA cloud product is rising, but still lags behind flagship ERP products like ECC 6, and some customers see the need for more discussion on SAP’s prolonged move to the cloud.

DSAG, a group representing SAP users in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, also released data from a survey of its members. It found the most-used SAP product was still its traditional ERP line, with 68% of respondents saying they used it, compared to 41% for S/4HANA on-premises and 11% and 6%, respectively, for S/4HANA private and public cloud.

DSAG’s chairman, Jens Hungershausen, said that perception of SAP’s cloud strategy was highly mixed, despite small gains made in cloud usage.

“The DSAG members surveyed are critical of SAP’s S/4HANA cloud strategy,” he said in a statement. “Only 13% of those surveyed had a positive opinion, just under half had a negative one.”

Security and AI were both important topics to DSAG members, as growing percentages cited it as a key topic for the future in the group’s survey. Fully 88% of those polled rated security as of either medium or high relevance to them, while the number of respondents saying they planned to invest in AI more than doubled in the last two years, to 28%. In the latter category, the group again wanted to see SAP take more input from the community, with just 31% rating the company’s AI strategy as “good” or “satisfactory.”

Part of the problem for SAP, according to IDC senior vice president for research Bob Parker, is that the company isn’t seen as a leading partner for more transformative technologies, like AI and cloud.