SAP landscape worth $ 39 billion could move to the cloud in the next two years, as large enterprises plan to migrate 46% of their existing SAP on-premise environment, revealed a HCL Technologies commissioned study.
It revealed that 45% of organisations have increased their SAP cloud investments over the past year and that they expect to nearly double these investments in the next 12 months.
Migration isn’t just being motivated by potential cost savings, as the research highlights business agility and speed (59%), access to new technologies (46%) and improved customer satisfaction (43%) as big drivers.
“These findings clearly demonstrate that there is a market shift towards moving a greater proportion of existing SAP environments to the cloud,” said Steve Cardell, President – Enterprise Services and Diversified Industries, HCL Technologies.
“Improved business agility and speed is undoubtedly a big driver, as is the growing maturity and availability of new cloud-based technologies. For those organisations looking to refresh their existing estates, reduce cost and access HANA-powered applications SAP’s cloud offerings are an attractive proposition. In fact, 56% of organisations stated they expect to use SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud in the future,” added Cardell.
When asked about the biggest inhibitors to moving more SAP applications and infrastructure to the cloud, 30% respondents noted integration challenges with existing systems, while 36% cited security concerns.
This isn’t surprising considering 88% of organisations expected to adopt a hybrid model, while 45% stated that integration into their existing landscape had been their biggest cloud implementation challenge to date, according to the study.
The survey showed that organisations are in need of help when it comes to their cloud strategies, with only 18% stating they had a comprehensive cloud strategy.
According to Cardell, cloud is undoubtedly disrupting traditional enterprise architectures and organizations now have to contend with a multi – cloud environment in which they need to integrate SAP and non -SAP applications into their existing landscape.
“This has ultimately made integration and cloud orchestration a key concern. Only by taking a lifecycle view of cloud enablement, from assessment right through to service delivery, will organisations be able to overcome integration issues and truly realise business benefit,” added Cardell.
The survey also found that SAP’s Cloud Extension policy, which enables the partial termination of existing on-premise software licenses and associated maintenance costs, has made moving to the cloud a more attractive prospect for nearly three-quarters (74%) of organisations.
These findings are perhaps unsurprising given that 30% of organisations said their existing investments in on-premise and legacy systems had been an inhibitor to moving more SAP applications and infrastructure to the
cloud.
The global survey of 100 large enterprises with revenues in excess of $1 billion was commissioned by HCL Technologies and conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne.