Flexibility Over Big Bets

Mastering SAP Collaborate, an SAP TechEd on Tour event, takes place at ICC Sydney on 18–19 November 2026. In the lead-up to the event, SAPinsider has been speaking with sponsors about the state of the SAP market in Australia and the wider APAC region, what makes the region unique for SAP customers, and what those customers are up against.

This conversation was with three leaders from GoWide Solutions: Naresh Kumar, Founder and CEO; Amit Sirwa, Global Head of Operations; and Brendan Coleman, Sales Director APAC. GoWide built its reputation on deep SAP Customer Experience (CX) expertise. Kumar was one of the world’s first certified Hybris practitioners and spent years in the CX space with large systems integrators. The company has since extended their focus into end-to-end SAP implementation and integration across ERP, SAP Business AI Platform, and the CX portfolio of commerce, sales, service, and engagement.

What emerged was a picture of a market where the appetite for innovation remains, but the willingness to commit to large, multi-year transformation programs has diminished.

A Market Defined by Caution and Cost Pressure

For Kumar, the central challenge facing Australian CIOs and CFOs is justifying the value of transformation. “Changing technology alone is not providing a value proposition to the business,” he said. “If you’re moving from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, that might be a win for SAP but may deliver less immediate value for the business.” Without a clear business outcome, building the pitch for budget is difficult.

The economic backdrop makes that pitch harder still. Kumar pointed to broken supply chains, persistent inflation, and widespread cuts to operating expenditure, leaving delivery and operations managers stretched. Organizations already paying significant sums to maintain SAP ECC environments may not be in a position to fund multi-year transformation programs. He noted that new license activity in SAP Commerce Cloud has slowed dramatically over the past year as buyers hold off, partly because of AI. In addition, many are asking whether to wait until the agentic layer in commerce matures before committing.

All of this is happening alongside a mandated move to the cloud. SAP Commerce Cloud customers are being moved onto CCv2, and SAP now offers a modular commerce option alongside cloud ERP, with pricing based on the modules a customer subscribes to and consumes.

Australia’s market also has structural differences from the Americas and EMEA. It is much smaller, with a limited number of large banks and enterprises. Culturally, he described a market that is deliberately slower to adopt. “It’s not a Silicon Valley vibe,” he said, adding that many senior decision-makers are later in their careers and understandably cautious about high-risk innovation.

Coleman shared an example that captures the moment. A major construction materials company is planning a storefront migration for SAP Commerce Cloud. Facing a construction downturn, rising interest rates, and pressure from low-priced imports, it is building a business case that spreads the investment across two financial years, even though it is a market leader trying to stay ahead of competitors.

On-Demand Expertise Instead of Rigid Contracts

GoWide’s response is to make it easier for customers to keep moving without betting tens of millions of dollars on a single long-term decision. “You need to keep the lights on,” Kumar said. “You need to keep the ball moving, and the innovation should not stop.”

That means aligning to business priorities rather than to statements of work. If a customer signs up for two Hybris developers and its priorities change, GoWide is happy to swap one for an SAP ECC specialist. Coleman described the company’s SAP Flex offering as a no-lock-in subscription model that lets organizations draw down expertise whenever they need it, whether that’s for SAP Integration Suite, CX, ERP, or finance, without every out-of-scope request becoming a change request.

In practice, GoWide positions itself as an embedded extension of a customer’s own SAP team. It can work through backlogs, deliver a discrete project such as an AI agent, or keep business-as-usual work moving while other systems integrators run major programs. Sirwa summed up the message as “enterprise delivery without the enterprise overhead.”

According to Kumar, the company’s pipeline reflects this. Customers are not choosing GoWide for the brand recognition of a global consultancy; they come for one of three reasons: cost, time, or expertise.

Putting AI to Work, and Managing the Human Side

Coleman described GoWide’s use of AI as a two-pronged approach. First, the team has built reusable AI agents that handle the repetitive work in migration projects, such as storefront migrations, working alongside Joule to reduce time and cost. Second, after go-live, GoWide uses process mining to find the slow, manual processes that hold teams back, then automates them.

One proof of concept involved purchase orders and quote requests arriving across 50 mailboxes. The customer was processing about 250,000 of them a year at roughly 10 minutes each, the equivalent of around 20 full-time staff doing manual ERP data entry. GoWide found a way to automate that work. Other use cases include month-end closes and a CRM query assistant that lets executives pull information on demand without an additional CRM license.

Technology is often the easy part. Coleman said that departmental leaders get excited quickly, but moving from pilot to production takes longer. Staff may see administrative work as their core contribution, and finance teams want proof of auditability, ideally from someone who has done it first, before AI touches anything revenue related. He said the answer is to tie every initiative to measurable ROI and position it to free people for higher-value work, with a clear plan for where those hours go.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Build the business case around outcomes, not upgrades. In a market where budgets are tight and multi-year programs are hard to fund, lead with what the business gains rather than the technology change. Break larger initiatives into phases that deliver measurable value early, and consider spreading investment across financial years where needed.

Plan for the people side of AI from day one. AI pilots are easy to start but hard to scale. Bring finance and audit stakeholders in early, define how AI-driven processes will be auditable, and decide in advance how staff time freed by automation will be redeployed, so teams see AI as an opportunity rather than a threat.

Connect with GoWide Solutions at Mastering SAP Collaborate. If you are weighing a Commerce Cloud or storefront migration, struggling with an SAP backlog, or looking for a manual process to automate, visit GoWide in Sydney on 18–19 November. Offerings like SAP Flex and how on-demand access to CX, SAP Business AI Platform, and SAP S/4HANA expertise could keep your roadmap moving without a long-term contract.