SAP’s Innovation Bottleneck

Customers are increasingly becoming unsettled because SAP does not offer any perspectives, innovations, or visions.

An example of SAP’s past innovativeness: SAP had the idea of its own IT service management (ITSM) and invented SolMan. It naturally took time for this tool to become a universal problem solver in the on-prem area, but there was a vision, a roadmap, and ultimately a convincing solution. Currently, the SAP community needs a similar answer for cloud computing, but SAP only offers an enhanced monitoring program. For SAP Cloud ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), there is a roadmap, but no vision.

SAP has cloud potential but is currently recklessly surrendering it to ServiceNow. SAP had CRM potential but had to surrender it to Salesforce. SAP had IoT and Industry 4.0 potential but carelessly and imprudently neglected and abandoned the Leonardo program. Understandably, the SAP community wonders: What happened to AI, ML, blockchain, RPA? The innovation bottleneck could mean the end of SAP in a few years. A look at the share price shows that financial analysts already see SAP in a difficult position. In a few years, the majority of SAP’s customers will probably be on S/4 and Hana, but they will also have no roadmap on where to go from there.

Naturally, there will be some AI, blockchain, and RPA solutions from SAP as well, but the true innovations for successful digital transformation will come from other IT companies. Even now, some SAP partners are more innovative than SAP itself. If this trend continues, SAP will be relegated to the back of the pack and will only be an ERP service provider and nothing more.