The E3 Cover Story, a Critical Discourse on SAP

Cloud computing was a much-discussed topic for a long time, then a standard, and thanks to hyperscalers, the cloud became a huge market with huge sales. Cloud computing is currently under discussion again and oscillates back and forth between sovereign, hybrid, private and public cloud. Which ERP architecture should the existing SAP customer choose?

In the age of digital transformation, the decision on the future ERP architecture presents existing SAP customers with a complex dilemma that goes far beyond the simple choice between their own data center (on-prem) and the external cloud (private or public cloud). While the classic on-prem...

The activities of the 180 SAP partners in Bremen at the congress of the DSAG user association with over 5,000 participants were strikingly different from Viva Technology, an IT and AI event in Paris in the early summer of 2025. While the SAP community in German-speaking countries is still struggling with digital transformation and S/4 conversion, with the focus on topics such as monitoring, automation, IT platforms and data management, visitors to Paris were able to admire numerous operationally functioning AI applications from the global IT community and its customers. Even former SAP CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe was on the...

SAP license management, once already a domain of complex rules and opaque metrics, has developed into an even denser jungle over the past three years, with many existing customers finding it difficult to keep track of the pathways. SAP's cloud strategy and the implementation of Full Use Equivalent as a new license model are at the heart of this development.

Members of the SAP community from the R/2 and R/3 era have fond memories of the CCC. The Customer Competence Center provided first-level support to existing SAP customers through their own IT departments. Because SAP obviously considers everything that comes from a successful on-premise era to be „the devil's work,“ the CCC became the CCoE, or Customer Center of Expertise. An experiment!