Workato’s Pitch to SAP Shops: Your Old Integrations Are the New Bottleneck

There is a quiet crisis hiding inside many SAP landscapes, and it is not the migration timeline. It is the integration layer underneath it. Years of SAP PI/PO middleware, custom RFC code, and legacy enterprise service buses have hardened into technical debt that slows every project that touches data. Workato’s SAP positioning names that problem with unusual directness: Yesterday’s SAP integrations have become today’s innovation bottlenecks.

Replace The Plumbing, Not Just The ERP

Workato’s case is that modernizing SAP is not only about getting to SAP S/4HANA. It is about replacing the accumulated integration debt with what the company calls a modern, AI-ready SAP orchestration fabric that consolidates integration, automation, API management, and agentic orchestration into a single platform while reducing the SAP ecosystem’s total cost of ownership.

The technical hooks are real, not just marketing. Workato offers an SAP-certified RFC connector alongside what it describes as 10,000-plus pre-built connectors, and it emphasizes its clean core. By moving SAP-relevant process logic out of custom ABAP and into an external orchestration layer, customers can contribute to SAP’s clean core and turn change management into an opportunity for agility and low-cost development. For organizations that have been repeatedly told to stop modifying the core, an integration platform that incorporates that logic is a practical path to compliance, not a slogan.

On the AI side, Workato points to Workato ONE extending intelligence across the SAP portfolio, ECC, CRM, SRM, S/4HANA, and out to non-SAP applications, with pre-built AI agents, an Agent Studio for customization, and the ability to expose SAP data through MCP APIs for advanced AI. The use cases it cites are deliberately mundane and high-volume: pricing updates, purchase order processing, large-table data extraction without custom code, and high-volume create, read, update, and delete operations via an OData connector.

The Proof Point and Numbers

Workato anchors the pitch in customer outcomes. It cites a 50% reduction in effort and 100x cost savings, and points to Marel, which replaced SAP PI/PO and validated product master data across teams to streamline ERP and warehouse integrations for faster, more reliable global operations. There is also a clear statement of where this matters most, from the company’s Enterprise Integrations Manager: “When you’re transforming from fragmented regional systems to globally centralized back-office operations while running a greenfield SAP S/4HANA implementation, integration and automation is one of the key pillars.”

That quote captures the strategic moment precisely. The integration layer is not a supporting actor in an SAP S/4HANA program. It is load-bearing.

Why The Timing Is Right

The broader data backs the urgency. SAPinsider’s Deployment Approaches to SAP S/4HANA 2025 research found a majority of organizations focused on moving to SAP S/4HANA as quickly as possible, with more than a third planning SAP S/4HANA Cloud through RISE or GROW with SAP. Speed-driven, cloud-bound migrations expose integration debt quickly because every legacy interface has to be repointed, retested, or replaced. Meanwhile, SAPinsider’s AI Adoption and Maturity benchmark found that while 91% of organizations use AI at some level, only 17% have embedded it into core workflows, with automation and cost reduction the top driver at 35%. You cannot orchestrate AI across systems that do not cleanly communicate with each other, which is why the integration layer increasingly sets the ceiling for AI ambition.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Put SAP PI/PO end-of-life on the same roadmap as your SAP S/4HANA move. Migrating the ERP while leaving legacy middleware in place just relocates the bottleneck. SAPinsiders should inventory their SAP PI/PO and ESB interfaces now, classify them by business criticality, and decide which to retire, re-platform, or rebuild before they become go-live blockers.

Use the integration layer to defend the clean core. Every piece of process logic that is pushed out of custom ABAP and into orchestration is logic that the integration specialist or enterprise architect does not have to re-validate against clean core rules later. When a new requirement tempts a core modification, IT leaders must evaluate whether an external orchestration layer can carry it instead, and make that the default question in design reviews.

Treat integration readiness as AI readiness. With only 17% of SAPinsider respondents embedding AI into core workflows, the gating factor is usually plumbing rather than models. Before scaling agentic or analytics initiatives, data managers must confirm that high-value SAP data is exposed through governed, reusable APIs, so AI projects inherit clean access rather than each building its own brittle connection.