SAP is always keen to highlight the latest adoption figures for its S/4HANA software suite, as well as HANA Cloud Platform, its entry into the PaaS (platform as a service) market. But raw numbers for new product sales don't always tell the full story about customer attitudes and awareness.
Hence, newly released surveys from the Americas' SAP Users' Group on both S/4HANA and HCP are of particular interest. (Disclosure: Prior to my role at Constellation Research, I worked for ASUG in a research and writing capacity.)
S/4HANA
While SAP has pledged to deliver mainstream maintenance for Business Suite 7—the version run by the bulk of its large enterprise customers—until the end of 2025, it's made it abundantly clear that S/4HANA is the path forward and the target for new innovations.
In its Q3 earnings release, SAP said more than 4,100 customers had purchased S/4HANA and more than 350 were live.
ASUG's survey drew 749 respondents in total consisting mostly of ASUG members in various IT-related roles. Some 557 responded a question asking whether they had purchased S/4HANA, with 33 percent saying they had. But only 8 percent of that total said their company was live on the suite. Twenty-eight percent said a purchase is planned between now and the end of 2018, while 20 percent didn't know and another 19 percent said they have no intentions of buying S/4HANA anytime soon.
SAP officials have already said publicly that most initial S/4HANA deployments are occurring on-premises, and the survey validates that, with 38 percent of 563 respondents naming it as their preferred option. Only 2 percent preferred a public cloud option, with private and hybrid cloud coming in at 9 and 10 percent, respectively. Thirty-three percent weren't sure.
Meanwhile, SAP's decision to strongly identify S/4HANA as the future seems to be resonating. Asked to name their top driver for adopting S/4HANA, 28 percent of 571 respondents cited a sense that "S/4HANA is where SAP is making primary investments and innovation." Respondents chose a number of other reasons in single and low double-digit percentages, and there's a good point to be drawn from that, as ASUG states:
We would note that in two areas, our survey respondents had no clear consensus answer—to a question asking for the number-one driver to adopt S/4HANA and to a question asking for the number-one obstacle to embracing the suite. We’re curious if that diversity of opinion speaks well to S/4HANA being multi-faceted, or is it more that customers are still struggling with constructing a clear business case.
HANA Cloud Platform
SAP has said about 4,000 customers and 500 partners are using HCP to build applications, extend existing ones and integrate others. That is a small percentage of SAP's more than 300,000 customers and it's not clear how many of the 4,000 are even SAP shops (although the likelihood is high).
Simply put, HCP seems to have an awareness problem.
ASUG's survey results for HANA Cloud Platform suggest that SAP needs to do a better job of explaining HCP and why it's relevant to customers. Only 33 percent of 534 respondents said they were "completely clear on what HCP is and why my organization might need it." Twenty-nine percent had "no idea" what HCP is, and another 33 percent said they need more information. Survey results also showed a general lack of awareness for SAP's App Center for HCP-built apps.
HCP has existed in some form since 2012, with SAP greatly expanding its capabilities over the past five years. But SAP might be better served by focusing on evangelizing HCP in 2017, as ASUG notes:
There’s a definite hunger for more information about what HCP offers in terms of functionality and how the platform compares with other, more established enterprise platforms. Customers need to hear what their peers are creating using HCP and how these development projects are benefiting those organizations.
The Bottom Line
You can bet that SAP is taking the results of both ASUG surveys seriously. ASUG members run the gamut from CIOs to IT application managers to power users, who live and breathe SAP in their professional lives.
If SAP is having trouble articulating strong business cases for S/4HANA and raising awareness of HCP among this audience, it's got work to do in 2017—both for its own benefit and customers.
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